The present study used meta-analytic techniques to test whether trait consistency maximizes and stabilizes at a specific period in the life course. From 152 longitudinal studies, 3,217 test-retest correlation coefficients were compiled. Meta-analytic estimates of mean population test-retest correlation coefficients showed that trait consistency increased from .31 in childhood to .54 during the college years, to .64 at age 30, and then reached a plateau around .74 between ages 50 and 70 when time interval was held constant at 6.7 years. Analysis of moderators of consistency showed that the longitudinal time interval had a negative relation to trait consistency and that temperament dimensions were less consistent than adult personality traits.

http://jenni.uchicago.edu/Spencer_Conference/Representative%20Papers/Roberts%20&%20DelVecchio,%202000.pdf

The rank-order consistency of personality traits from childhood to old age: a quantitative review of longitudinal studies.

Although much has been learned from cross-sectional research on marriage, an understanding of how marriages develop, succeed, and fail is best achieved with longitudinal data. In view of growing interest in longitudinal research on marriage, the authors reviewed and evaluated the literature on how the quality and stability of marriages change over time. First, prevailing theoretical perspectives are examined for their ability to explain change in marital quality and stability. Second, the methods and findings of 115 longitudinal studies--representing over 45,000 marriages--are summarized and evaluated, yielding specific suggestions for improving this research, Finally, a model is outlined that integrates the strengths of previous theories of marriage, accounts for established findings, and indicates new directions for research on how marriages change.

The longitudinal course of marital quality and stability: A review of theory, methods, and research.

In this review, we evaluate four topics in the study of personality development where discernible progress has been made since 1995 (the last time the area of personality development was reviewed in this series). We (a) evaluate research about the structure of personality in childhood and in adulthood, with special attention to possible developmental changes in the lower-order components of broad traits; (b) summarize new directions in behavioral genetic studies of personality; (c) synthesize evidence from longitudinal studies to pinpoint where and when in the life course personality change is most likely to occur; and (d) document which personality traits influence social relationships, status attainment, and health, and the mechanisms by which these personality effects come about. In each of these four areas, we note gaps and identify priorities for further research.

/pdf/personality-development-stability-and-change-1t3gw7f44k.pdf

Personality development: stability and change.

People are interconnected, and so their health is interconnected. In recognition of this social fact, there has been growing conceptual and empirical attention over the past decade to the impact of social networks on health. This article reviews prominent findings from this literature. After drawing a distinction between social network studies and social support studies, we explore current research on dyadic and supradyadic network influences on health, highlighting findings from both egocentric and sociocentric analyses. We then discuss the policy implications of this body of work, as well as future research directions. We conclude that the existence of social networks means that people's health is interdependent and that health and health care can transcend the individual in ways that patients, doctors, policy makers, and researchers should care about.

/pdf/social-networks-and-health-t5ta4zzakv.pdf

Social Networks and Health

The life course paradigm has replaced child-based, growth-oriented (“ontogenetic”) accounts of the person with models that emphasize the timing, social context, and organization of lives from birth to death. The chapter begins with a story of this intellectual change from the thematic precursors of life course studies to the present. The next section identifies heuristic concepts that capture the dynamic properties of settings and contextualize the individual, including social pathways, the cumulation of experiences, trajectories and transitions, and turning points. The life course paradigm also offers core principles that link social change and developmental trajectories, including those of life-span development, human agency, timing, linked lives, and historical time and place. In combination, these principles represent key contributions to the study of human development. They establish development as a life-long phenomenon that includes aging into late adulthood; to highlight the agentic nature of people as they create and shape their settings within limits; view development as the confluence of age, the generations, and history; and situate each person's trajectory in terms of family, neighborhood, community, and society. Life course insights have been especially revealing in research on health, and offer great promise in the study of biology, experience, and adjustment.


Keywords:

social pathways;
birth cohorts;
contexts of human development;
developmental and social trajectories;
historical change;
transitions

The Life Course and Human Development.

How is personality stability possible amid the myriad of social changes and transformations that characterize a human life? We argue that by choosing situations that are compatible with their dispositions and by affiliating with similar others, individuals may set in motion processes of social interchange that sustain their dispositions across time and circumstance. To test this proposition we examined mate selection, using data on married couples from two ongoing longitudinal studies at the Institute of Human Development, University of California, Berkeley. Consistent with other research, the results point to homogamy as a basic norm in marriage. More important, the results show that marriage to a similar other promotes consistency in the intraindividual organization of personality attributes across middle adulthood. We offer some speculations for a more relational approach to the problem of individual continuity and change. Throughout our lives we interact with new people, enter new relationships, and move to new environmental settings that can be expected to change our personality. But change is not imminent. Longitudinal explorations have repeatedly confirmed that individual differences in personality characteristics are stable across time and circumstance (e.g., Caspi, Bern, & Elder, 1989; Conley, 1985; Costa & McCrae, 1980). How is stability possible amid the myriad of social changes and transformations that characterize a human life? Stability is possible in part because individuals create the environments in which they live. More often than not, they choose jobs and activities that are compatible with their own dispositions and select friends and mates who are similar to themselves. These social selections may, in turn, reinforce and sustain individuals' dispositions. In this article we shall demonstrate this important outcome. Specifically, individuals who are married to similar others are more likely to display consistency in the organization of their personality attributes throughout middle adulthood.

Continuity and change: assortative marriage and the consistency of personality in adulthood.

Do spouses become more similar over time? What processes contribute to enduring similarities between them? Using the 20-year Kelly Longitudinal Study of couples, no support for the hypothesis that couples increasingly resemble each other with time was found. Rather, couples maintain the same degree of similarity across 20 years. Structural equation analyses suggest that the shared environmental experiences of couples play a significant role in maintaining these similarities over time. We distinguish the shared marital environment from the shared rearing environment and consider developmental and dynamic-relational factors that moderate the relative importance of nonshared and shared environmental experiences in life-span personality development. Whereas nonshared influences in one's family of origin contribute to development in childhood and adolescence, shared influences in one's family of destination may contribute a great deal to development in adulthood.

Shared experiences and the similarity of personalities: a longitudinal study of married couples.

Childhood personality and the prediction of life-course patterns.

This study provides a direct test of whether the observed similarity of spouses is due to initial assortment rather than to convergence of phenotypes. With data from three well‐known longitudinal studies, phenotypic convergence is examined using both variable‐ and person‐centered analyses. The longitudinal evidence does not support the hypothesis that couples increasingly resemble each other with time. Spouse correlations most likely reflect initial assortment at marriage and not the convergence of phenotypes.

Ellen S. Herbener

Papers

Continuity and change: assortative marriage and the consistency of personality in adulthood.

Shared experiences and the similarity of personalities: a longitudinal study of married couples.

Childhood personality and the prediction of life-course patterns.

Marital assortment and phenotypic convergence: Longitudinal evidence