A Longitudinal Study of Change and Sameness in Personality Development: Adolescence to Later Adulthood

Abstract

The life span from early adolescence to later adulthood, with assessments at four different time periods, was described by means of Q-sort items and analyzed according to processes of personality change and maintenance of sameness. Change was determined by analyses of variance with repeated measures, and sameness was indexed by intraclass rs. A replicative design was used with a total of 136 longitudinally studied participants in four different samples: male and female participants in the Oakland Growth Study and the Guidance Study. The preservation of sameness was the most frequently observed phenomena, but two different kinds of systematic change were identified: transpositions within the participants' maintenance of internal consistency across time and emergent changes for samples with marked discontinuities among individuals. The pattern of these results is consistent with the view that development during adulthood involves reorganization, and the content of the findings are compatible with Erikson's descriptions of the stage of identity formation, intimacy, generativity, and integrity.