Poster #31 - Identity Development and Self-Other Agreement on Personality Traits: A Pre-registered Longitudinal Secondary Data Analysis

• In Event: 3-001 - Poster Session 2 during Breakfast

Abstract

Accurately measuring personality traits is central to many developmental researchers. Although, personality traits are relatively stable, there is evidence that individuals can act differently across time and situations (Ross & Nisbett, 2011). Identity development is considered a central psychosocial task for adolescence and may contribute to consistency of self and peer reported personality traits (Erikson, 1968; Cheek, 1982). The Big Five Aspects Scale (BFAS) is a more fine-grained measure of personality that includes ten aspects and the Big Five domains (McCrae & Costa, 1987; (BFAS) DeYoung et al, 2007). The BFAS aspects include volatility, withdrawal, compassion, politeness, industriousness, orderliness, enthusiasm, assertiveness, intellect, and openness. Convergent validity between raters has not yet been explored. We examine the convergent validity of the BFAS between self and peer report measures. To further investigate potential influences for the association, we explore if identity synthesis is a moderator between self-peer report BFAS agreement ((EPSI); Rosenthal et al., 1981).
We conduct secondary analysis on a subsample of a larger longitudinal study of predominately freshman students. Participants completed study questionnaires and provided contact information for three peers to complete corroborating peer-reported measures. Before accessing the data and conducting analysis, we completed a pre-registration plan and uploaded it to the Open Science Framework website.
The final sample at includes 215 participants with at least one peer report. The analytical sample has mean age 18.76 (SD = 0.79) and is 77% White. We used confirmatory factor analysis to create latent factor scores for each aspect, Big Five trait, and identity subscale. The correlations between the self-peer report latent BFAS scores are high with an average correlation of 0.47 (Table 1). In conclusion, there is evidence the BFAS self-peer report scores show convergent validity for six of the 15 personality aspects and traits using the strict test of the correlation being significantly greater than 0.40 with a significance level of p ≤ 0.05. Briefly, Table 2 shows the correlations between self-peer reported difference scores and self-reported identity synthesis scores.
Even with high correlations between self-peer report, only six aspects reach convergent validity according to our analysis. It may demonstrate that self and peer reports capture a similar construct but different components of personality. Although identity does not consistently explain the differences between self-peer agreement, it did enhance our understanding of withdrawal, neuroticism, assertiveness, and extraversion. These results provide researchers measurement and developmental considerations when assessing personality traits.

Authors

• Ummul-Kiram Kathawalla, University of Minnesota
  Presenting Author

• Moin Syed, University of Minnesota