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Columns::September 23, 2002
UGA again named one of America’s top public universities
New athlete academic center named for Rankin Smith Sr.
Administration building atrium named for business, civic leader
Historian to present Charter Lecture about 1904 ‘childnapping’ incident
Rolling out the welcome mat
Skin deep
Avian Medicine Professor Emeritus George ‘Buck’ Rowland dies at 64
Update: Private Giving
Kudos
The idea of change
One year later
Good to the last drop
Campus News
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| To study the impact of personality on the development of children, Charles Halverson has carried out longitudinal studies that follow children through adolescence and young adulthood. (Photo by Peter Frey) |
Prof’s research is full of personality
By Denise Horton
dhorton@uga.edu
Nursery school teacher is generally low on the list of preferred jobs for newly minted Ph.D.s.
But for Charles Halverson, professor of child and family development in the College of Family and Consumer Sciences, that first job after he earned his doctorate from Syracuse University was the beginning of 40 years of research into the personalities of children and their families.
“That first position was at a nursery school that was part of the National Institutes of Mental Health,” Halverson says. “Beginning in the mid-1960s, NIMH began a longitudinal study of 2,000 married couples. That study was extended to continue following them after they had their first child. My job was to observe these children, who were around three years old, as they participated in the nursery school.”
Halverson spent 11 years at NIMH prior to joining the FACS faculty here.
When he began his graduate work at Syracuse, only a handful of universities offered doctorates in personality psychology. That hasn’t changed, but during the past decade the field itself has undergone significant changes as it has established quantifiable ways of identifying personalities.
“Personality psychology has always had a bad name because we couldn’t get our scientific act together,” says Halverson. “There was sort of a cottage industry of concepts and measures. Everyone had their own instruments for measuring personality. All of that has changed in the past 10 years. There’s been an emerging consensus of how to measure personality in adults.”
Another significant change in the field—which Halverson and his colleagues have been leading—is the establishment of similar personality measurements for children.
In 1991, Halverson and a Dutch colleague developed the idea of a cross cultural study of children’s personalities.
“The field of child development has ignored the long-term consequences of differences in personality on development,” Halverson says. “The 1960 Handbook on Child Development contained only superficial information on personality. Today, textbooks may have a couple of paragraphs of what Freud had to say about children’s personalities, and maybe some Erikson quotes. None of these researchers talk about individual differences and their real-world consequences on development.”
According to Halverson, a taxonomy for adult personality types began years ago when researchers developed a dictionary of personality characteristics that identified some 10,000 to 12,000 descriptive words. In a series of studies, those many words have slowly been whittled down to what are called “the big five” personality descriptors: extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism and intellectual openness.
“Those studies worked for adults,” Halverson says. “But when it comes to kids, we decided that the best source for descriptions of kids was their parents. We didn’t ask the parents to describe their children’s personalities. We just asked them to tell us about their children.”
With funding from NIMH, the researchers gathered information from parents in China, Holland, the United States, Germany, Poland, Greece, Russia, Korea and Spain. Then Halverson and his colleagues began working to develop a culturally decentered instrument that could be used around the world to measure children’s personalities.
“For the past four or five years we’ve been giving this instrument to thousands of parents, mostly in the United States, China and Greece, for kids of different ages,” Halverson says. “Now we’re in the middle of our analysis of whether that instrument is accurate—and it looks like it’s working.”
Halverson’s real goal is understanding the impact of personality on the development of children as they become adults.
“How personality differs is linked in important ways to adaptive outcomes, such as problem-solving skills, behavior problems in children, and self-esteem issues,” Halverson says. “We’re trying to encourage family researchers to consider children’s personalities as they study how well children do. Ultimately, we would like to develop interventions for kids with different traits to ensure that they are successful in their relationships throughout life.”
The biggest barrier to conducting research on personality development is the time involved, Halverson says.
“If we were studying fruit flies, we could go through multiple generations in a short time,” he says. “But when you’re studying kids, you have to wait for them to grow up to finish your research.” |
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