Paul J. Frick - Clinical Assessment of Child and Adolescent Personality and Behavior

University of New Orleans, New Orleans, LA, USA

University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg, MS, USA

Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA, USA

Paul J. Frick (Corresponding author)

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Christopher T. Barry

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Randy W. Kamphaus

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A trait is often conceptualized as a relatively stable disposition to engage in particular acts or ways of thinking (Kamphaus, 2001 and in press). A child, for example, may be described by her parents as either shy or extroverted. The shy (introverted in psychological terms) child may tend to cope with stressful situations by withdrawing from social contact, whereas the extrovert readily approaches social situations. For parents and psychologists alike, these traits are often thought to have value for predicting human behavior, because of the presumption of trait stability across time and, in many cases, environments. In fact, because of trait stability, parents may take special precautions to ensure that the shy child adapts well to the social aspects of attending a new school by asking one of their childs friends who attends the same school to accompany the child on the first day. Similarly, a stable tendency to be shy or introverted should manifest itself in numerous social situations such as interactions in the neighborhood, at church, and in ballet class. Personality traits, then, are characterized by longitudinal and situational stability, not unlike other enduring characteristics of a person such as intelligence, height, and activity level.

In 1961, Tupes and Christal discovered five factors of personality that appeared in the reanalysis of numerous data sets from scales of bipolar personality descriptors. These central personality traits have subsequently become the focus of an extensive research effort, including the development of tests designed to assess the constructs. One of the well known scales used to identify the big five in adults is the NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI; Costa & McCrae, 1985).

Although commonly referred to as factors because of their origins in factor analysis, they are prototypical examples of traits with the requisite characteristic of presumed stability. The big five factors are typically identified by bipolar comparisons that are summarized in Table . These factors are often assessed using forced-choice item formats in which adjectives are used as personality descriptors. This item format is in direct contrast to the more commonplace true/false item format that is typical of many psychological tests.

Commercially available instruments such as the NEO-PI have provided new opportunities to study and refine these constructs. Given the amount of research and development in this area, the big five personality factors could eventually have a substantial impact on the field of child and adolescent personality assessment. With some noteworthy exceptions (e.g., Lynam et al., 2005) however, big five research has largely been focused on adult populations.

A concept related to personality is temperament , which also emphasizes the measurement of specific traits that are hypothesized as underlying behavior across settings. In this regard, Goldsmith and Rieser-Danner (1990) observed, most researchers consider temperament to be the behavioral manifestation of biologically influenced processes determining both the infants characteristic response to the environment and his or her style of initiating behavior (p. 250). Therefore, some researchers distinguish temperament from personality based on the presumed biological basis of temperament, whereas personality is thought to be formed by a dynamic interplay of biological and social factors over development (Frick, 2004; Martin, 1988). Predictably, much of the research on temperament is conducted with infants and young children. In this conceptualization, personality may be viewed as being superimposed on a persons temperamental foundation. This distinction between temperament and personality, however, is not universally agreed upon.