Shiner Et Al 2021 Personality Assessment of Children and Adolescents

Annual Review of Developmental Psychology
Personality Assessment of
Children and Adolescents
Rebecca L. Shiner,1 Christopher J. Soto,2
Annu. Rev. Dev. Psychol. 2021.3:113-137. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org
and Filip De Fruyt3,4

1
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Colgate University, Hamilton,
Access provided by 191.111.45.14 on 01/15/24. For personal use only.
New York 13346, USA; email: rshiner@colgate.edu

2
Department of Psychology, Colby College, Waterville, Maine 04901, USA
3
Department of Developmental, Personality, and Social Psychology, Ghent University,
9000 Ghent, Belgium
4
Edulab21, Institute Ayrton Senna, 05423-040 São Paulo, Brazil
Annu. Rev. Dev. Psychol. 2021. 3:113–37 Keywords

First published as a Review in Advance on
personality assessment, children, adolescents, measurement, traits,
September 13, 2021
social-emotional skills, personality development
The Annual Review of Developmental Psychology is
online at devpsych.annualreviews.org Abstract
https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-devpsych-050620-
This review offers a theoretical and practical guide to assessing a broad range
114343
of personality differences in middle childhood and adolescence. We begin by
Copyright © 2021 by Annual Reviews.
highlighting normative changes in middle childhood and adolescence that
All rights reserved
shape the personality differences youth display. We then review the assess-
ment of four broad domains of personality in children and adolescents: tem-
perament and personality traits, social-emotional-behavioral (SEB) skills,
motivation and agency (including goals, values, and interests), and narrative
identity. We conclude by offering a primer of general principles for assessing
personality in childhood and adolescence: pursuing ongoing construct val-
idation, weighing strengths and weaknesses of various informants and data
sources, combining measures, addressing heterotypic continuity, obtaining
child self-reports, and pursuing promising new directions. It is well worth
taking on the challenges inherent in assessing these individual differences
because children and adolescents display a rich, complex, and meaningful
set of still-changing personality differences that shape the course of their
lives.
113
Contents
1. INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
1.1. Normative Developmental Changes in Middle Childhood and Adolescence . . 116
1.2. Implications of Normative Development for Personality Assessment
in Middle Childhood and Adolescence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116
2. ASSESSMENT OF TEMPERAMENT AND PERSONALITY TRAITS . . . . . . . 117
2.1. The Nature of Temperament and Personality Traits: More Alike Than
Different . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117
2.2. Assessment of Broad Trait Domains . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
2.3. Assessment of More-Specific Facet Traits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
2.4. Trait Assessment Across Developmental Periods and Informant
Perspectives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
2.5. Alternatives to the Questionnaire Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120
2.6. Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
3. SOCIAL, EMOTIONAL, AND BEHAVIORAL SKILLS IN CHILDHOOD

AND ADOLESCENCE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
3.1. What Are Social, Emotional, and Behavioral Skills, and Why Are They
Important? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
3.2. Questionnaire Assessment of Social-Emotional-Behavioral Skills . . . . . . . . . . . . 122
3.3. Assessment of Skill Domains and Facets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122
3.4. Alternatives to Questionnaire Inventories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124
3.5. Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124
4. MOTIVATION AND AGENCY: GOALS, VALUES, AND INTERESTS . . . . . . . 124
4.1. Goals: Achievement and Social Strivings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124
4.2. Values . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125
4.3. Interests . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126
4.4. Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126
5. NARRATIVE IDENTITY: ADOLESCENTS’ LIFE STORIES AS AN
EMERGING ASPECT OF PERSONALITY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127
5.1. Adolescents’ Life Narratives as an Emerging Aspect of Personality . . . . . . . . . . . 127
5.2. Assessment of Narrative Processing in Adolescents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127
6. A PRIMER ON PERSONALITY ASSESSMENT IN CHILDREN AND
ADOLESCENTS: ISSUES TO CONSIDER AND NEW DIRECTIONS . . . . . . 128
6.1. Back to the Basics: Construct Validity in Youth Personality Assessment . . . . . . . 128
6.2. Sources of Personality Data: Self-Report, Informant Report,
and Behavioral Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128
6.3. Combining Multiple Sources of Personality Information . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129
6.4. Lower Limits on Verbal Self-Report Measures in Children
and Alternative Means of Gathering Youth Self-Report . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130
6.5. Addressing Heterotypic Continuity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130
6.6. Future Directions: State Measurement, Cross-Cultural Assessment,
and Race and Ethnicity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130
7. CONCLUSION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131
114 Shiner • Soto • De Fruyt

1. INTRODUCTION
By middle childhood, children display a rich range of personality characteristics. One child—let
us call her Anne (with an “e”)—may be outgoing, curious, empathic, and easily stressed; have
difficulty regulating her emotions in charged situations; and strive for academic achievement
(Montgomery 1976). Another child—let us call him Harry—may be fiercely loyal to his friends,
brave, and bold, even in dangerous situations, but have a hard time controlling his temper (Rowling
1999). Youth display an even greater variety of personality characteristics by adolescence when
they begin to explore their identities and craft their emerging life narratives. Youth’s personality
differences have implications for their success at important life tasks and their mental health (De
Fruyt et al. 2017, De Fruyt & Karevold 2021, Hill et al. 2019, Kushner 2015, Roberts et al. 2007),
and their personalities change at both individual and mean levels over time (Shiner 2021, Soto &
Tackett 2015), making personality an important potential target for prevention and intervention
efforts (see the sidebar titled Personality Does Change in Childhood, Adolescence, and Adult-
hood). To study and address personality differences in children and adolescents, reliable and valid
assessment is key.
This review offers a theoretical and practical guide to assessing a broad range of personality dif-
ferences in middle childhood and adolescence. Our broad perspective on personality draws from
McAdams’ model of personality development (McAdams 2013, 2015), which describes three over-
arching domains of personality and their emergence in the first two decades of life. In this model,
young children are seen as actors on their life stage who are already displaying temperamental ten-
dencies to think, feel, and behave in somewhat consistent ways across situations and time in early
childhood. These earliest temperamental tendencies become elaborated over time and take the
form of the Big Five personality traits. By middle childhood, children become motivated agents
who actively shape their lives as they pursue meaningful goals, articulate their values, and explore
their interests. Finally, later in adolescence, youth start to become authors who develop life narra-
tives that weave together stories linking their past with their present and their imagined futures.
We begin by highlighting recent research on normative changes in middle childhood and
adolescence that shape the personality differences young people display. We then review the
assessment of four broad domains of personality in children and adolescents: temperament and
PERSONALITY DOES CHANGE IN CHILDHOOD, ADOLESCENCE, AND

ADULTHOOD
Sometimes researchers, practitioners, and laypeople alike claim that personality is highly stable and therefore un-
worthy as a topic for developmental research or a target for intervention. However, research over the past two
decades has demonstrated convincingly that personality—in all of the domains covered in this review—changes
throughout childhood and adolescence and that such changes continue well into adulthood (McAdams et al. 2019).
Change includes at least two key types: rank-order change, or changes in the relative ordering of individuals on a
personality difference (indexed by correlations across time), and mean-level change, or changes in the average level
of a personality characteristic as individuals get older (Caspi et al. 2005). Temperament and personality traits, for
example, show moderate rank-order stability by preschool age but still manifest substantial rank-order change in
adulthood, and they change in their mean levels in childhood, adolescence, and adulthood as well (Soto & Tackett
2015). Interventions may further facilitate personality change in childhood and adolescence (Kautz et al. 2014). Per-
sonality differences are both stable enough to be meaningful and changeable enough to be worthy of developmental
study or intervention.
www.annualreviews.org • Personality Assessment of Children and Adolescents 115

personality traits, social-emotional-behavioral (SEB) skills, motivation and agency (including
goals, values, and interests), and narrative identity. We conclude by offering a primer of general
principles for assessing personality in childhood and adolescence, including suggestions for new
directions in youth personality assessment.
1.1. Normative Developmental Changes in Middle Childhood and Adolescence

As children and adolescents develop, they display an increasingly broad and differentiated range
of individual differences. Normative biological, cognitive, socioemotional, and environmental
changes affect the personality differences that youth manifest at each age, as well as the meth-
ods needed for assessment.
Middle childhood is a period of substantial growth and change. Researchers have recognized
for decades that, at the start of middle childhood, children undergo a transition termed the “age
5- to 7-year shift” (White 1965). During this transition, children experience biological changes,
including the start of cortical maturation and reorganization, increased sexual differentiation in
brain pathways, and greater brain plasticity (Campbell 2011). These biological changes are accom-
panied by cognitive changes: greater skill in reasoning and problem solving, stronger capacities for
adopting multiple perspectives, growth in attention and working memory, and greater ability to
think about the future (Del Giudice 2014). By around age 8, children develop a better understand-
ing of their own traits, interests, and abilities and are able to use that information to evaluate and
reflect on their thoughts, emotions, and behaviors, including in comparison with others (Davis-
Kean et al. 2009). Children become a more critical part of their societies during middle childhood,
and their social contexts broaden. Ethnographic work has revealed that, across societies, it is dur-
ing middle childhood that adults begin to focus on deliberately teaching children the norms and
roles within their cultures, including the foundational skills necessary for work and relationships in
adulthood (Lancy & Grove 2011). In most contemporary cultures, children enter formal school-
ing and are evaluated with more stringent standards. Children begin to spend more time with
peers, and these peer interactions profoundly shape children’s self-views (Rubin et al. 2015).
Normative change is even more visible and pervasive in adolescence, a period that begins with
the onset of puberty and ends with the achievement of adulthood, though the markers of adulthood
are debated (Steinberg 2016). A cascade of biological changes takes place, including the release
of hormones, structural and functional changes in the brain, greater brain plasticity, metabolic
changes, and alterations in circadian rhythm (Dahl et al. 2018). These biological changes are asso-
ciated with a host of cognitive and emotional-motivational changes, including greater capacities
for abstract thinking and perspective taking, heightened reward and sensation seeking, a stronger
orientation toward peers and social status, and exploration of romantic and sexual interests (Dahl
et al. 2018). Growth in these self- and other-oriented domains motivates adolescents to explore
their identities, their life goals and commitments, and the ways that they can contribute to society,
and young people develop increasingly complex and differentiated views of themselves (Crone
& Fuligni 2020). Across societies, adolescents attain greater autonomy as their environments be-
come more peer-oriented; their social networks expand, and they explore a greater breadth of
environments, although relationships with parents remain vitally important (Dahl et al. 2018).
1.2. Implications of Normative Development for Personality Assessment

in Middle Childhood and Adolescence
These normative changes in middle childhood and adolescence have implications for the person-
ality differences that can be assessed in youth. First, because of children’s increasing cognitive and
socioemotional capacities during middle childhood, the personality traits that school-age children

display are broader than those seen earlier in childhood. These include individual differences in
how they view themselves relative to others (e.g., their sense of being liked and accepted); their
thoughts, emotions, and behaviors involving the future (e.g., worries about the future, capacities
for planning and persevering over time, responsibility toward others); and their intellectual cu-
riosity and interests. Second, because of the centrality of academics and peers in middle childhood
and adolescence, some of the most important personality differences involve youth’s behaviors
and goals in the context of academic work (e.g., carefulness in schoolwork, motivation for aca-
demic achievement) and peer relationships (e.g., sociability, motivation for social status). Third,
school-age children display new personality differences that reflect their emerging capacities for
agency (McAdams 2013). Because school-age children become better able to imagine the future,
develop greater independence, and work on adopting the norms and roles of their societies, they
develop their own goals, values, and interests. Fourth and finally, individual differences in identity
and narrative development become a key aspect of personality in adolescence as young people
become capable of more complex reflection about themselves and their lives. We now turn to the
topic of how best to assess this breadth of personality differences in young people.
2. ASSESSMENT OF TEMPERAMENT AND PERSONALITY TRAITS

2.1. The Nature of Temperament and Personality Traits: More Alike
Than Different
Individual differences in the behavior of children and adolescents are most often conceptualized
and assessed in terms of traits: characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving that tend
to be relatively consistent over time and across relevant situations (Allport 1937). Traditionally,
personality and developmental psychologists have distinguished between two classes of traits: tem-
perament and personality. Temperament is typically defined as including traits that appear early in
life (e.g., during the first year or two) and have a stronger biological basis (Shiner et al. 2012). Tem-
perament traits are often organized into three broad domains: Surgency, Negative Affectivity, and
Effortful Control (Rothbart et al. 2001). In contrast, personality traits incorporate a broader range
of characteristics that gradually unfold across childhood, adolescence, and adulthood (Shiner &
Caspi 2012). These characteristics are most commonly structured in terms of the Big Five trait
domains: Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Neuroticism, and Openness to Expe-
rience ( John et al. 2008).
It has become increasingly clear that temperament versus personality is a distinction without
much of a difference (Shiner & De Young 2013, Soto & Tackett 2015). For example, there is
close correspondence between major temperament and personality trait domains: temperamen-
tal Surgency corresponds with Big Five Extraversion, Negative Affectivity with Neuroticism, and
Effortful Control with Conscientiousness (De Pauw et al. 2009, Tackett et al. 2013). Both temper-
ament and personality traits are structured hierarchically, with broad domains that each subsume
a number of more-specific facets (Rothbart et al. 2001, Soto & John 2017). Childhood analogs
of the Big Five can be observed by early childhood (De Pauw et al. 2009, Soto & John 2014),
and temperament traits can still be seen in adults (Evans & Rothbart 2007). Both temperament
and personality traits are influenced by people’s genetic and neurobiological makeup, as well as
their environments and experiences, and heritability estimates are very similar between different
temperament and personality traits (Polderman et al. 2015, Vukasovic & Bratko 2015).
It is important to note that, although temperament and personality traits appear to reflect sim-
ilar basic traits with similar structure and sources, measures of the two kinds of traits do not assess
entirely commensurate sets of tendencies (De Pauw 2017). Temperament and personality traits
may differ in terms of their predictive validity for youth’s life outcomes. Temperament measures

Table 1 Prominent questionnaire measures of personality and temperament traits in childhood and adolescence
Number of Developmental Informant Number
Measure Trait domains facets periods perspectivea of items
Personality questionnaires
Hierarchical Personality Inventory for Big Five 18 Early childhood Parent (self ) 144
Children (Mervielde & De Fruyt to early
2002) adolescence
Inventory of Child Individual Big Five 15 Early childhood Parent (self ) 144
Differences (Halverson et al. 2003) to early
adolescence
Big Five Inventory–2 (Soto & John Big Five 15 Early adoles- Self (peer, parent) 60
2017) cence to
adulthood
NEO Personality Inventory–3 (McCrae Big Five 30 Adolescence to Self (peer) 240
et al. 2005) adulthood
Temperament questionnaires
EAS Temperament Survey (Buss & Emotionality, Activity, None Infancy to early Parent 20
Plomin 1984) Sociability, Shyness childhood

Rothbart temperament questionnaires
Infant Behavior Questionnaire–Revised Surgency, Negative 14 Infancy Parent 191
(Gartstein & Rothbart 2003) Affectivity, Orienting/
Regulation
Early Childhood Behavior Surgency, Negative 18 Early childhood Parent 201
Questionnaire (Putnam et al. 2006) Affectivity, Effortful
Control
Children’s Behavior Questionnaire Surgency, Negative 15 Early to middle Parent 195
(Rothbart et al. 2001) Affectivity, Effortful childhood
Control
Temperament in Middle Children Surgency, Negative 17 Middle Parent 157
Questionnaire (Simonds 2006) Affectivity, Effortful childhood
Control, Sociability/
Affiliation
Early Adolescent Temperament Surgency, Negative 12 Middle childhood Self (parent) 65
Questionnaire–Revised (Ellis 2002) Affectivity, Effortful to early
Control, Affiliation adolescence
Adult Temperament Questionnaire Extraversion, Negative 18 Adulthood Self 177
(Evans & Rothbart 2007) Affectivity, Effortful
Control, Affiliation,
Orienting Sensitivity
a
Informants used to develop each measure are listed outside of parentheses. Alternative informants are listed in parentheses.
often focus more on basic emotional and behavioral processes, whereas personality measures in-
clude more items assessing youth’s social behavior and typical styles of thinking about their expe-
riences (Shiner & De Young 2013). As a result, researchers need to carefully consider the content
of specific measures before deciding whether to assess temperament or personality traits.
Reflecting the similarities across the two trait domains, we review measures of temperament
and personality traits together. Table 1 lists prominent trait measures that are often used to assess
children and adolescents. This table highlights important similarities and differences between spe-
cific measures as well as broader conceptual and practical issues. These issues include assessment of
broad trait domains, assessment of lower-level facet traits, and assessment during different devel-
opmental periods and using different rating perspectives (e.g., self-report, parent report, observer
report).

2.2. Assessment of Broad Trait Domains
Both youth and adult personality traits are most commonly assessed in terms of the Big Five
domains. Extraversion can be defined as the extent to which a person is sociable, assertive, and
energetic, as opposed to being more socially and emotionally reserved. Agreeableness refers to
how much compassion, respect, and trust someone feels toward other people, as opposed to being
self-centered, argumentative, and suspicious of others. Conscientiousness is the extent to which
someone prefers organization and order, stays focused on tasks, and meets responsibilities, as op-
posed to being more disorganized and lackadaisical. Neuroticism represents how prone someone
is to experience negative emotions, such as fear, sadness, and anger. Finally, Openness to Experi-
ence is the extent to which someone prefers new and complex ideas and experiences, as opposed
to familiar and conventional ones. As shown in Table 1, a number of questionnaire inventories
can be used to assess the Big Five in childhood and adolescence, including the Hierarchical Per-
sonality Inventory for Children (HiPIC) (Mervielde & De Fruyt 2002), the Inventory of Child
Individual Differences (ICID) (Halverson et al. 2003), the Big Five Inventory–2 (BFI-2) (Soto &
John 2017), and the NEO Personality Inventory–3 (NEO-PI-3) (McCrae et al. 2005).
Many temperament measures can be conceptualized as assessing a subset of the Big Five do-
mains that are especially prominent during childhood. For example, the temperament question-
naires developed by Mary Rothbart and colleagues (Ellis 2002, Evans & Rothbart 2007, Gartstein
& Rothbart 2003, Putnam et al. 2006, Rothbart et al. 2001, Simonds 2006) comprise the domains
of Surgency, Negative Affectivity, and Effortful Control, which represent childhood analogs of Ex-
traversion, Neuroticism, and Conscientiousness, respectively (De Pauw et al. 2009, Tackett et al.
2013). An alternative temperament measure, the Emotionality Activity Sociability (EAS) Temper-
ament Survey (Buss & Plomin 1984), assesses emotionality, activity, shyness, and sociability. EAS
emotionality corresponds closely with Big Five Neuroticism, whereas activity, shyness, and socia-
bility can be conceptualized as facets of Extraversion that are closely related in adulthood but may
be more distinct and prominent in childhood (De Pauw et al. 2009, Soto & John 2014).
2.3. Assessment of More-Specific Facet Traits

Both temperament and personality trait domains can be conceptualized hierarchically, with each
broad domain subsuming several more-specific facets. These facet-level traits are related to each
other but still distinguishable such that they each provide some unique behavioral information
(Costa & McCrae 1995, Soto & John 2017, Paunonen & Ashton 2001). Most inventory measures
listed in Table 1 assess traits at both the domain and facet levels. However, there is consider-
able variability in the number of facets assessed as well as the specific content of these facets.
In part, these between-measure differences may reflect heterotypic continuity, the phenomenon
that broad traits can be expressed through different specific behaviors during different devel-
opmental periods (Caspi & Roberts 2001, Putnam et al. 2008). However, these differences also
reflect the fact that there is not yet consensus about the most important facets within each trait
domain. The structure and assessment of facet-level traits remain important topics for future re-
search, and researchers and practitioners should consider the facets assessed when picking a trait
measure.
2.4. Trait Assessment Across Developmental Periods and Informant Perspectives

The task of assessing temperament or personality traits using a questionnaire inventory is neces-
sarily different when the person being assessed is a preschooler versus an adolescent. The inven-
tories listed in Table 1 differ in terms of the developmental periods and rating perspectives used

to develop them. The EAS Temperament Survey was initially designed to assess traits during early
childhood, the HiPIC and ICID to assess traits during early and middle childhood, and the BFI-2
and NEO-PI-3 to assess adolescents and adults. The Rothbart temperament questionnaires are
distinctive in that they include different questionnaires targeting different developmental periods
from infancy to adulthood. They therefore have the advantage of ensuring developmental appro-
priateness at each age but the disadvantage that trait scores are not directly comparable across
developmental periods. As for informant perspective, the temperament questionnaires, HiPIC,
and ICID were initially developed and validated using a parent-report format, whereas the BFI-2
and NEO-PI-3 were primarily developed using self-reports.
To some extent, questionnaire measures can be administered beyond their originally intended
developmental periods and informant perspectives (e.g., De Fruyt et al. 2000, Soto et al. 2017).
However, there are limits to this flexibility. For example, late middle childhood appears to be
the lower bound for obtaining psychometrically sound self-reports on most trait measures (Allik
et al. 2004, Capaldi & Rothbart 1992, De Fruyt et al. 2000, Soto et al. 2008). Moreover, using an
inventory whose content focuses on one developmental period to describe youth during another
period carries the risk that some meaning will be lost in developmental translation. We return to
this topic in our discussion of general principles.
2.5. Alternatives to the Questionnaire Approach

Several innovative assessment approaches have been pioneered as alternatives to Big Five ques-
tionnaire measures. For example, the common-language California Child Q-Set (CCQ) (Caspi
et al. 1992) is designed to minimize individual differences in response style. Although the CCQ
items are descriptive statements similar to those of a standard trait inventory, they are adminis-
tered in a Q-sort format: Respondents are instructed to sort the set of 100 CCQ items into a fixed
distribution from those most descriptive to least descriptive of the target child. The CCQ items
can then be analyzed individually or scored in terms of the Little Six traits: the Big Five plus an
Energy Level trait that is especially prominent during childhood (Soto 2016, Soto & John 2014).
Another creative twist on the inventory format is the Berkeley Puppet Interview (BPI)
(Measelle et al. 1998). Each BPI item is a pair of contrasting statements that are administered
in an interview format using two puppets. One puppet says a statement (e.g., “I’m shy when I
meet new people”), the second puppet says the contrasting statement (“I’m not shy when I meet
new people”), and then both puppets invite the child to respond (“How about you?”). Children’s
open-ended responses are coded to reflect the direction and strength of their agreement with the
two statements. The BPI can be used to obtain self-reports of the Big Five during early childhood
(Measelle et al. 2005).
Rather than asking children or observers to rate youth’s traits, researchers and practitioners can
directly observe youth’s behavior. For example, in the thin-slice protocol (Tackett et al. 2016), chil-
dren are recorded while completing a series of behavioral tasks (e.g., pretend to introduce yourself
to another child, take turns removing blocks from a tower, sing your favorite song). Observers then
rate each child’s traits on the basis of their behavior during the tasks. The thin-slice procedure can
be used to generate ratings of the Big Five that reliably converge with parent-reported personality,
strengths, and behavioral problems (Tackett et al. 2016, 2019).
These alternatives to the questionnaire approach also have limitations. For example, they are
generally time intensive to administer and labor intensive to score. Moreover, their psychometric
properties are less well understood than those of questionnaire inventories. However, they offer
innovative ways to elicit trait-relevant information.

2.6. Summary
Researchers and practitioners have a number of options for assessing the temperament and per-
sonality traits of children and adolescents (see Table 1). These options reflect several points of
emerging consensus: that temperament and personality are similar constructs but that their con-
tent does not entirely overlap, that childhood analogs of the Big Five can be measured by the early
school years, and that more-specific facets can be distinguished within each broad trait domain.
However, they also highlight some consequential choices: which trait domains and facets to assess;
whether to rely on youth’s self-reports, parent reports, or another data source; and whether to use
a standard questionnaire inventory or an alternative approach.
3. SOCIAL, EMOTIONAL, AND BEHAVIORAL SKILLS IN CHILDHOOD

AND ADOLESCENCE
3.1. What Are Social, Emotional, and Behavioral Skills,

and Why Are They Important?
Over the past two decades, psychologists, policymakers, educators, and economists alike have ar-
gued for the importance of SEB skills for youth’s successful development. These skills involve
children’s and adolescents’ abilities to maintain social relationships, regulate emotions, and man-
age goal- and learning-directed behaviors (Soto et al. 2021a).
The economist James Heckman called attention to the importance of what he called “noncog-
nitive skills” in education. Heckman and colleagues (2010) reanalyzed data collected in the High-
Scope Perry Preschool Program Longitudinal Study (Nores et al. 2005, Schweinhart et al. 2005).
They found that participants assigned to a preschool intervention were more successful than a
control group on a variety of SEB outcomes, despite negligible long-term effects on cognitive
ability. These findings underscore the importance of SEB skills and have led to calls for students
to develop these skills (Kankaraš & Suarez-Alvarez 2019). Such skills should enable young people
to deal with challenges and disruptions to the labor market and future societies. From this perspec-
tive, educational curricula should not only teach academic content knowledge but also explicitly
teach youth SEB skills.
The concept of SEB skills has gained further attention due to their potential malleability. Meta-
analyses of skill-focused interventions have found that they typically produce medium-sized gains
in SEB skill development, which persist over time and lead to subsequent gains in student out-
comes (Durlak et al. 2011, Taylor et al. 2017). This increased attention on SEB skills has helped
connect the fields of child and adolescent personality with education, encouraging the fields to
think about the joint development of abilities, personality traits, attitudes, mindsets, and interests
in young people.
Despite widespread consensus about the importance of SEB skills, the conceptualization of
skills remains contested. De Fruyt and colleagues (2015) and the Organization of Economic Co-
operation and Development (OECD) ( John & De Fruyt 2015, Kankaraš & Suarez-Alvarez 2019)
define SEB skills as “individual characteristics that: (a) originate in the reciprocal interaction be-
tween biological predispositions and environmental factors, (b) are manifested in consistent pat-
terns of thoughts, feelings and behaviors, (c) continue to develop through formal and informal
learning experiences, and (d) influence important socio-economic outcomes throughout the in-
dividual’s life” (De Fruyt et al. 2015, p. 279). This definition is broad enough to include person-
ality traits but underscores the malleability—rather than consistency—of individual differences
in behavior. By contrast, other scholars explicitly distinguish SEB skills from personality traits.
For example, Soto and colleagues (2021a) argue that skills reflect how well a person can enact a

particular behavior when the situation calls for it, whereas personality traits reflect how frequently
a person tends to enact the behavior, averaged across situations.
Although different models have proposed divergent sets of skills, ranging in number from a few
to more than a hundred ( John & De Fruyt 2015, Kankaraš 2017, Kankaraš & Suarez-Alvarez 2019,
Soto et al. 2021a), there is emerging consensus that these skills can be grouped into five domains:
engaging with others/social engagement, collaboration/cooperation, task performance/self-
management, emotion regulation/emotional resilience, and open-mindedness/innovation
(Abrahams et al. 2019, John & De Fruyt 2015, Kankaraš & Suarez-Alvarez 2019, Soto et al.
2021a). Table 2 presents measures used to assess five prominent SEB skill models. As shown
in the column listing the domains covered in each model, these SEB skill domains largely
parallel the conceptual space defined by the Big Five personality traits, reflecting the domains of
Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability, and Openness.
3.2. Questionnaire Assessment of Social-Emotional-Behavioral Skills

Table 2 also summarizes the key characteristics of the five questionnaire measures designed to
operationalize the prominent SEB skills models. These questionnaires differ from each other in
several ways (Abrahams et al. 2019, Soto et al. 2021a): a focus on typical versus optimal perfor-
mance, the breadth of domains covered, and facets included.
As noted above, some scholars define SEB skills with a focus on how individuals tend to behave,
averaged across situations, while others focus on how individuals are capable of behaving when
the situation calls for it. Reflecting these alternative conceptualizations, the measures listed in
Table 2 operationalize skills in two different ways or in a hybrid of different ways. The OECD
Social and Emotional Skills Instrument (Kankaraš & Suarez-Alvarez 2019) and the Tripartite Tax-
onomy of Character (TTC) (Park et al. 2017) resemble trait inventories in that their items are
descriptive statements, and respondents rate how accurately each item characterizes their typi-
cal pattern of behavior. In contrast, the Social and Emotional Competency Assessment (SECA)
(Davidson et al. 2018) and the Behavioral, Emotional, and Social Skills Inventory (BESSI) (Soto
et al. 2021b) adopt a format in which each item describes a particular skill, and respondents rate
how capably they can perform that skill. Finally, the Social and Emotional Nationwide Assessment
(SENNA) (Primi et al. 2016, 2021) is a hybrid measure that systematically includes both trait-like
and self-efficacy items to assess SEB skills.
3.3. Assessment of Skill Domains and Facets

A second way that SEB skill measures differ is their assessment of broad skill domains. The OECD,
SENNA, and BESSI inventories assess all five of the major skill domains that map roughly onto the
Big Five. The TTC covers much of the same content, but it merges engaging with others/social
engagement and collaboration/cooperation skills into a superordinate domain of interpersonal
strengths. By contrast, the SECA adopts a somewhat narrower range of content. Specifically, it
excludes open-mindedness/innovation skills so as to focus on SEB characteristics that are maxi-
mally distinct from cognitive ability.
These measures also differ in their assessment of more-specific skill facets (e.g., facets such
as empathy, trust, and teamwork within the collaboration/cooperation domain). As shown in
Table 2, the OECD, SENNA, and BESSI inventories assess several skill facets within each do-
main, with a total of 15 to 32 facets across the five domains. By contrast, the SECA and TTC
measures assess only 5 and 7 skill facets, respectively. Thus, researchers and practitioners inter-
ested in assessing skills at both the domain and facet levels should consider administering one of

Table 2 Prominent questionnaire measures of social-emotional-behavioral skills

Informant Number
Measure Construction background Skill domainsa Skill facets Developmental periods perspective of items
OECD Social-Emotional Social-emotional skill Engaging with others (E), 15 facets under domains, Students 10–15 years Self, parent, 120 + 16
Skill Measure (OECD literature review collaboration (A), task achievement teacher
2019) performance (C), emotion motivation, and general
regulation (ES), self-efficacy
open-mindedness (O)
Social and Emotional Collaborative for Academic Relationship skills (E), social 2 self-awareness and 3 Elementary, middle, and Self 40
Competency and Social Emotional awareness (A), self-management facets high school students
Assessment (SECA) Learning (CASEL) self-management (C),
(Davidson et al. 2018) framework; cocreated with self-awareness (ES + O),
US students responsible decision-
making skills (A + C)
Tripartite Taxonomy of Character strengths Interpersonal strengths (A), 3 interpersonal, 2 Elementary, middle, and Self, parent, 24
Character (TTC) (Park framework; cocreated with intrapersonal strengths (C), intrapersonal, and 2 high school students teacher
et al. 2017) US students and teachers intellectual strengths (O + intellectual facets
www.annualreviews.org
E)
•
Social and Emotional Social-emotional literature Engaging with others (E), 17 identity/trait and 17 Students 11–19 years Self, parent, 153
Nationwide Assessment review; cocreated with amity (A), self-management self-efficacy facets teacher
(SENNA) (Primi et al. Brazilian educators (C), emotion regulation
2016, 2021) (ES), open-mindedness (O)
Behavioral, Emotional, Personality framework Social engagement (E), 29 facets and 3 High school students and Self and observer 192
and Social Skills cooperation (A), compounds adults
Inventory (BESSI) self-management (C), (self-reflection,
(Soto et al. 2021b) emotional resilience (ES), adaptability, capacity
innovation (O) for independence)
a
Following each skill domain is the corresponding Big Five domain in parentheses. Abbreviations: A, Agreeableness; C, Conscientiousness; E, Extraversion; ES, Emotional Stability; O, Openness
to Experience/Intellect.
Personality Assessment of Children and Adolescents

123
the former three measures. If the length of these measures (which range from 120 to 192 items)
is a concern, then they may choose to administer a subset of the facet scales.
3.4. Alternatives to Questionnaire Inventories

Beyond these questionnaire inventories, alternative measures of SEB skills are also available. The
most prominent alternative approaches are task performance measures and situational judgment
tests (SJTs). Task performance measures present respondents with standardized situations or stim-
uli designed to elicit specific skills, such as creativity (Torrance 1966) or emotional intelligence
(Mayer et al. 2003). By contrast, SJTs present hypothetical scenarios calling for particular skills,
along with a list of possible responses, and then grade the effectiveness of individuals’ selected
responses (e.g., MacCann & Roberts 2008). Even more so than skill inventories, task performance
measures and SJTs operationalize SEB skills as capacities or abilities. However, the psychometric
characteristics of these alternative approaches are generally less well established. Particular con-
cerns include the low reliability of some task performance measures (Eisenberg et al. 2019, Enkavi
et al. 2019) and the questionable discriminant validity of SJTs (McDaniel et al. 2016).
3.5. Summary
There is an emerging consensus that SEB skills include a wide range of capacities relevant for
positive adaptation and that these capacities share a similar domain-level structure with the Big
Five traits. Thus, future research can focus on further investigating the nature of skills: whether
they can be empirically distinguished from personality traits and cognitive ability, how they typi-
cally develop across the life span, whether they are impacted by interventions, and their validity in
predicting consequential outcomes. Considerable work is still needed on how these measures can
best be used in the school context in a way that is valid, ethical, and practical (Duckworth & Yeager
2015). A researcher or practitioner selecting a skills measure should consider whether they wish
to assess SEB skills as behavioral tendencies versus capacities, the importance of assessing broad
skill domains versus more-specific facets, and the strengths and weaknesses of questionnaire in-
ventories versus alternative approaches.
4. MOTIVATION AND AGENCY: GOALS, VALUES, AND INTERESTS

Beyond traits and SEB skills, children and adolescents vary on social-cognitive constructs that are
narrower in scope and more situation-bound. As a result of the 5- to 7-year-shift, early in ele-
mentary school children begin to display new personality differences that reflect their emerging
capacities for agency (McAdams 2013). Because of the large and varied sets of individual differ-
ences studied in the broad area of motivation, our review of this domain is of necessity selective.
We describe briefly only a few such characteristics—goals, values, and interests—to offer a sense
of the strengths and limitations of assessment in this domain of individual differences.
4.1. Goals: Achievement and Social Strivings

By early in elementary school, children vary in their self-directed goal striving. Goals involve
pursuit of a particular object in the future, and they direct or guide behavior (Elliot & Fryer
2008). Because two central developmental tasks for children and adolescents are academic achieve-
ment and peer relationships (Masten et al. 1995), most goal research has focused on these two
domains.

In the domain of academic achievement, two goals have been seen as central for youth: mastery
focused on individual development and performance focused on social comparison and compe-
tition (Urdan & Kaplan 2020). A widely studied taxonomy differentiates these two goals on the
basis of whether they are motivated by approach or avoidance concerns; thus, youth may pursue
mastery-approach goals (learning and improvement), mastery-avoidance goals (pursuing perfec-
tion or avoiding losing one’s abilities), performance-approach goals (demonstrating one’s compe-
tence or trying to do better than others), and performance-avoidance goals (trying to avoid looking
incompetent) (Sommet et al. 2021). Young people can provide self-reports on their goal orienta-
tions with the Patterns of Adaptive Learning Survey (Midgley et al. 1998) or the Achievement
Goal Questionnaire–Revised (Elliot & Muruyama 2008), for example. Youth’s goals for social re-
lationships fall along similar dimensions: how much youth want to improve their social skills and
relationships (mastery-approach), impress others with their popularity (performance-approach),
and avoid feeling embarrassed or rejected (performance-avoidance) (Rodkin et al. 2013, Rudolph
et al. 2011). In addition, youth vary in how much they pursue communal goals that are aimed at
developing positive relationships with others and agentic goals focused on obtaining status and
power (Ojanen et al. 2005).

A striking feature of the research on goals in youth is its productive use of brief self-report
questionnaires (Urdan & Kaplan 2020). Brief self-report measures offer ease of data collection in
the school context, and the widespread use of these measures has resulted in a rich and expan-
sive literature on youth’s goal orientations from late elementary school through college (Sommet
et al. 2021, Urdan & Kaplan 2020, Wigfield et al. 2021). For example, research on achievement
motivation has addressed the development of individual differences in motivation in the broader
family, school, and sociocultural contexts (Wigfield et al. 2015, 2021). The study of goals could
build on its existing foundations by broadening both the methods of assessment and the goals be-
ing investigated. Parents, teachers, and peers may have insight into youth’s goals and could serve
as alternative informants, particularly for younger elementary school–age children. Social vignette
measures ask participants to imagine themselves in hypothetical scenarios and then to rate their
goals in those scenarios; such measures may provide valid measures of goals, especially if children
are asked to rate their goals in vignettes that involve imagining interactions with particular known
peers (Lemerise et al. 2017). Finally, children and adolescents pursue goals that extend beyond
those typically assessed, a point made clear when youth are asked open-ended questions about
their motivations (Morsink et al. 2017, Urdan & Kaplan 2020).
4.2. Values
Values express a person’s key motivations and overarching goals (Döring et al. 2016); values are
typically broader than goals, however, and reflect motivations that cut across life domains. By mid-
dle childhood, children have begun learning about the values of their families, cultural groups,
and broader societies; they can express their own individual sense of values as well. Over the past
decade, researchers have begun applying Schwartz’s (1992) circumplex model of universal val-
ues in adults and adolescents to the study of children. This model includes 10 values that appear
across cultures: power, achievement, hedonism, stimulation, self-direction, universalism, benev-
olence, tradition, conformity, and security. These values form a circular structure with two axes:
one ranging from self-enhancement (concern for self ) to self-transcendence (concern for others)
and the other ranging from conservation (preservation of the status quo) to openness to change.
There are several measures available for assessing values in youth based on Schwartz’s model.
One option is the Picture-Based Value Survey for Children (Döring et al. 2010); children see pic-
tures and captions representing each of the values and then sort them by how important each

value is in their lives. In contrast, the Animated Values Instrument presents children with ani-
mated scenarios with visual, auditory, and written components (Collins et al. 2017); 21 subsets
of five values are presented in sequence, and children pick the values that best and worst match
their own within each set. These two picture-based measures can be administered to children by
early middle childhood (Daniel et al. 2020). Children as young as 10 are able to complete modi-
fied versions of the Portrait Values Questionnaire (Schwartz et al. 2001), a questionnaire measure
developed for adults; the measure presents respondents with short verbal descriptions of the goals
and motivations of gender-matched individuals, and respondents rate their similarity with that
person. The creative development of youth measures has allowed research on values in children
and adolescents to develop fairly rapidly.
4.3. Interests
Vocational interests are preferences for leisure, study, and work activities and environments in
which persons can perform these activities (Wille & De Fruyt 2019). Interests are critically impor-
tant because they shape a range of formal and informal choices that impact adolescents’ develop-
ment and life course at a sensitive time when youth are exploring and consolidating their identities.
Vocational interests affect consequential outcomes in the short and long term, and their impact on
occupational outcomes is sometimes larger than that of cognitive abilities and personality traits
(Rounds & Su 2014).
Although several models have been described in the literature (Nye & Rounds 2019), John
Holland’s RIASEC model (Holland 1966, 1997) has been the predominant model for describing
vocational interests since the 1970s. This model distinguishes among six domains of interests: Re-
alistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising, and Conventional. These six domains have a
hexagonal ordering of three opposite pairs (Realistic versus Social, Investigative versus Enterpris-
ing, Artistic versus Conventional) and are useful for describing the characteristics of both persons
and environments. Recent extensions of Holland’s model have introduced subcomponents under
the six main interest types (Wille et al. 2015) or restructured the interest domains into a hierar-
chical model, distinguishing additional interest domains (Su et al. 2019).
Interest inventories typically ask students to indicate their preferences for a series of activities
or occupations that represent the RIASEC domains. There are numerous instruments assessing
youth’s interests based on the RIASEC model, with some, such as the Inventory of Children’s Ac-
tivities Revised (ICA-R) (Tracey 2002), specifically designed for use starting at the end of elemen-
tary school. Holland’s Self-Directed Search (Holland 1979, Holland & Messer 2017) is the most
prominent measure used from ages 11 to 70. There is evidence that the RIASEC model’s hexago-
nal structure becomes more clearly established from childhood to late adolescence (Hartung et al.
2005). Interest inventories have successfully made their way into the practice of educational and
counseling psychology by helping students explore their interests, skills, and strengths to make
study and career path choices (Su 2020).
4.4. Summary
Youth vary in their achievement and social goals, values, and interests—all reflections of their
emerging agency and self-direction—by middle childhood. More so than for temperament and
personality traits, these domains tend to be assessed via youth’s self-reports. The reliance on rel-
atively brief self-report inventories enables efficient data collection and highlights youth’s own
perspectives on their internal motivations. Researchers less often study aspects of agency in the
earlier part of middle childhood because children cannot complete existing questionnaire mea-
sures. Some youth may also lack insight into these aspects of their personalities. The use of

additional methods and informants to assess these constructs may add to the already-rich liter-
ature on motivation in children and adolescents.
5. NARRATIVE IDENTITY: ADOLESCENTS’ LIFE STORIES

AS AN EMERGING ASPECT OF PERSONALITY
5.1. Adolescents’ Life Narratives as an Emerging Aspect of Personality
One of the key normative tasks that begins in adolescence is the development of identity (Erikson
1968), a process that continues into early adulthood. Adolescents gradually take a more inde-
pendent position from their parents, exploring and making choices about identity-relevant issues
(Klimstra et al. 2013). In addition, adolescents begin the process of developing a narrative identity:
a life story that integrates one’s previous experiences with their goals, values, sense of meaning,
and expected future into a more coherent whole (McAdams & McLean 2013). This integrative
function helps young people begin to figure out who they are, how they came to be that per-
son, what provides them with a sense of meaning, and who they imagine becoming in the future
(McLean & Lilgendahl 2019); it also differentiates narrative identity from the other aspects of
personality discussed here. Young people narrate their life stories in ways that vary greatly from
one person to the next. For example, one person may tend to narrate their life using sequences
where painful experiences are redeemed by positive endings, whereas another may typically tell of
positive experiences that are contaminated by something negative (McLean et al. 2020). Younger
children begin setting the foundation for their later narrative identity as they mutually narrate
their experiences with their parents and other important people in their lives (Fivush et al. 2019).
By adolescence, youth develop the capacity for autobiographical reasoning, meaning that they
can use language to make connections from their past experience to their present sense of self and
imagined future (Habermas & Reese 2015).
5.2. Assessment of Narrative Processing in Adolescents

Life narratives can be obtained through formats that vary along several dimensions (Adler et al.
2017). First, narratives may be gathered either through oral interviews or in a written format.
Second, narratives may take a broad, life course perspective—by breaking various periods of life
into chapters—or may focus only on particular life episodes. Third, directed prompts can be used
to learn about specific types of experiences—for example, high or low points, turning points, self-
defining experiences, traumas, or transgressions. Any combination of these formats and prompts
is possible; however, because adolescents have fewer life experiences and do not yet have a full
life story, most narrative research on adolescents obtains shorter oral or written narratives about
particular episodes in youth’s lives rather than the whole life course.
Once narratives are obtained, they are coded on dimensions that reflect variations in how par-
ticipants tell their life stories (Adler et al. 2017). Research on large samples of emerging and midlife
adults suggests that these dimensions have a higher-order structure consisting of three main fac-
tors (McLean et al. 2020). First, motivational and affective themes reflect strivings toward com-
munion (connections with others) and agency (mastery and achievement), overall emotional tone,
and the presence of contamination and redemption sequences (positive situations turning bad and
negative situations turning good, respectively). Second, autobiographical reasoning indicates dif-
ferences in how much narrators explore, reflect, and create meaning out of experiences. Third,
structure indicates the extent to which narrators provide clear information on time, context, and
themes. The coding of life narratives enables researchers to conduct quantitative analyses, al-
though narratives can also provide rich qualitative insights into the lived experiences of youth,

offering an idiographic perspective on individual young people that complements more nomoth-
etic analyses.
6. A PRIMER ON PERSONALITY ASSESSMENT IN CHILDREN AND

ADOLESCENTS: ISSUES TO CONSIDER AND NEW DIRECTIONS
Personality assessment in youth is particularly complex because younger children often cannot
provide self-reports, so developmentalists need to rely on other means of assessment; in addition,
personality itself is a moving target during childhood and adolescence. These challenges have
forced people working with youth to be creative and deliberate in selecting their methods of mea-
surement. In the following we address a range of issues in selecting assessment methods for youth,
including trade-offs to consider.
6.1. Back to the Basics: Construct Validity in Youth Personality Assessment

Construct validation—the process of establishing the degree to which a measure assesses the con-
struct it is intended to measure—is the foundation for research on personality in youth. We will
be able to achieve a meaningful understanding of personality development in children and ado-
lescents only if we work to establish the construct validity of our measures. Construct validation
is a complex, ongoing process (Cronbach & Meehl 1955, Loevinger 1957), and it includes multi-
ple phases (Flake et al. 2017, p. 371): substantive (construct conceptualization, item development,
determination of content relevance and representativeness), structural (item analysis, factor anal-
ysis, reliability, measurement invariance), and external (convergent and discriminant, predictive/
criterion, and group comparisons). There are significant problems in the rigor of construct valida-
tion for most of the child personality constructs described in this review. These problems include
use of the same label to describe different constructs, lack of clarity regarding the basic structure
of various constructs, poor representativeness of the content domain due to the use of very short
scales, and lack of data on discriminant validity. We urge people assessing youth personality to
pursue ongoing validation of the measures being used, particularly when adapted or used in new
contexts or ages, and to pay careful attention to existing evidence of construct validity when se-
lecting measures (Flake et al. 2017). Open science practices also call for greater transparency in
the development, selection, and reporting of measures (Flake & Fried 2020).
6.2. Sources of Personality Data: Self-Report, Informant Report,

and Behavioral Data
Personality assessment in children and adolescents typically involves data collected from one of
three sources—self-report, informant report, or behavioral data—and each source has a mixture of
strengths and weaknesses. Self-report offers more intimate access to youth’s thoughts, feelings, and
motivations but may be difficult to obtain from younger children or biased by self-enhancement
processes and inaccurate social comparisons. Informants for youth typically include parents, teach-
ers, or peers, each with their own distinct vantage point. Parents observe their offspring most often
at home and can report on more rare or unguarded behaviors; however, they often have a more
limited reference group for comparison. Teachers observe students at school and have a broader
reference group, but they have more limited opportunities to observe each child, particularly in
middle and high school, and may face difficulty reporting on less easily observed behaviors. Peers’
views can be obtained via inventories or peer nominations. Peers have many rich opportunities
to observe the target in a number of contexts and are especially compelling as reporters on social

behavior and reputation, but they share the same developmental limitations as the self; moreover,
schools are increasingly limiting opportunities for peer data collection (Marks 2017).
Self-reports and informant reports are most often obtained via questionnaire inventories. A
well-designed inventory can be reliable, valid, efficient for collecting large amounts of data in a
shorter period of time, and flexibly administered in both self-report and observer-report formats—
all tremendous assets. However, questionnaires have limitations. Self-report questionnaires can be
difficult for younger children to complete, a point we return to shortly. Moreover, both self-report
and observer-report questionnaire responses can be biased by factors including social desirabil-
ity, acquiescent response style (i.e., someone’s tendency to consistently agree or consistently dis-
agree with items, regardless of their content), and use of more or less extreme response options
(Cronbach 1950, Jackson & Messick 1958). Such biases may be especially prevalent in youth’s
self-reports, because youth can have greater difficulty interpreting questionnaire items, less ex-
perience using multipoint response scales, and less clearly held self-views (Allik et al. 2004, Soto
et al. 2008). The influence of these biases can be reduced—but not eliminated—by using scoring
procedures that help correct for them or latent variable models that account for them as method
factors (Aichholzer 2014, Soto & John 2017).

Behavioral data—involving direct observation and measurement of behaviors—are obtained
through a variety of methods, including behavioral observations, experience sampling, wearable
devices (such as cameras and pedometers), and laboratory tasks (Funder 2019). Younger children’s
behavioral tendencies may be more easily and naturally observed than adults’, and both naturalis-
tic and lab-based systems have been developed for behavioral observations (Goldsmith & Gagne
2012). Laboratory tasks are used to assess both traits and SEB skills, particularly children’s capac-
ities for self-control and self-regulation (Robson et al. 2020). Behavioral data may appear more
objective than questionnaire data, but their reality is more complex given that the measurement
and interpretation of behavioral data require a series of subjective judgments (Funder 2019). Be-
havioral data are less efficient to obtain and may be harder to interpret because behavior is often
determined by multiple tendencies.
6.3. Combining Multiple Sources of Personality Information

Child psychologists have recognized for decades that children’s behavior varies across contexts
and that different informants have different insights; as a result, convergence between different
informant reports is typically low-to-moderate in size (Achenbach et al. 1987, De Los Reyes et al.
2015). Agreement between questionnaire and behavioral task measures of the same construct is
often particularly low (Dang et al. 2020, Wennerhold & Friese 2020). This may occur for a variety
of reasons: Inventories may assess typical performance and tasks optimal performance, inventories
may serve as trait measures and behavioral tasks as state measures, the reliability of some behavioral
task measures may be low, and the two may assess different aspects of the construct (Dang et al.
2020, Wennerhold & Friese 2020).
These findings make it clear that relying on a single informant or measure to assess youth’s
personalities limits progress; this is particularly a problem for literatures that are based almost
entirely on personality measures obtained from the same, single informant. Multi-informant as-
sessment improves the validity of personality measurement in youth and reduces overreliance on
a single source for all constructs. Multiple informant reports can be combined in a variety of ways,
including aggregating informants’ reports into a single score or focusing on shared variance across
informants by using latent variable approaches (De Los Reyes et al. 2019). An underused but po-
tentially valuable approach is the trait-score approach (Kraemer et al. 2003, Makol et al. 2020),
which involves selecting three informants who vary systematically in the context (e.g., home and

school) and perspectives (e.g., self- and other report) from which they observe the target child;
principal components or factor analysis is then used to extract a component—the trait score—
on which the three informants’ reports all load strongly. The increased validity that likely comes
from using multiple measures of youth’s personalities makes it well worth the challenges involved
in combining those reports.
6.4. Lower Limits on Verbal Self-Report Measures in Children and Alternative

Means of Gathering Youth Self-Report
A particularly challenging aspect of youth personality assessment is the difficulty of obtaining self-
reports from younger children. Younger children are limited in reading ability, may have difficulty
understanding the concepts being assessed, and may lack insight into their own characteristics
and standing relative to others. As noted earlier, children begin to develop a better sense of their
own individual differences, particularly in comparison with others, following the 5- to 7-year shift
(Davis-Kean et al. 2009). It is therefore typically easier to obtain self-reports of personality in

children following this shift. However, there are two important caveats to this general pattern.
First, although children appear to be able to provide self-reports after around age 8 on relatively
short and straightforward measures, youth’s self-reports for more complex and multidimensional
constructs—like the Big Five traits—may not be coherent and differentiated enough to yield a
clear multidimensional structure until late middle childhood or early adolescence (Allik et al. 2004,
Soto et al. 2008).
Second, children may be able to provide self-reports from ages 4 to 8 if the measure format
is altered to be developmentally appropriate (Sabol et al. 2021), as we have reviewed here for the
BPI and some values measures. Technology can be used to offer response options that younger
children can understand, and measures can be adapted using pictures or multimedia presentations
(Sabol et al. 2021). There is great value in developing new methods for assessing children’s early
emerging ways of making meaning out of their personalities and contexts.
6.5. Addressing Heterotypic Continuity

Another particular challenge for developmental personality research is heterotypic continuity—a
pattern where the outward manifestations of an underlying tendency change over time. For exam-
ple, the trait domain of negative emotionality/neuroticism changes from early childhood through
adolescence, broadening from mostly behavioral manifestations of negative emotions to include
more cognitive manifestations as well (Shiner 2019). Heterotypic continuity implies that the con-
tent of a measure should be developmentally appropriate for the person being assessed; it would
make little sense to ask whether a preschooler tends to complete their work assignments on time
or whether an adult resists being cuddled by their caregiver. Addressing heterotypic continuity is
crucial for maintaining construct validity in developmental research. There are three approaches
to addressing heterotypic continuity: including all possible content across all ages, including only
common content across all ages, and using only construct-valid content at each age (Petersen et al.
2020). Using construct-valid content has significant advantages over the other two options, and
new methods of developmental scaling are being developed for addressing heterotypic continuity
in this way (Peterson et al. 2020).
6.6. Future Directions: State Measurement, Cross-Cultural Assessment,

and Race and Ethnicity
Several issues stand out as important for future work on child personality measurement beyond
those we have already discussed. First, studies using state personality measures are relatively rare

in research on youth’s personalities. Yet state personality measurement is critical for obtaining a
better understanding of the processes underlying personality differences and their development
and the processes through which personality affects youth’s development (Baumert et al. 2017).
Future work measuring personality states, rather than only personality traits, will benefit from the
use of experience sampling, experimental designs, and task-based state measures. Second, cross-
cultural research on personality development in youth has proved to be complex because people
in different cultures interpret Likert scale response options in different ways (Abrahams et al.
2019). New methods, such as the use of anchoring vignettes to scale informants’ Likert ratings, are
needed to be able to study personality development across cultures (Abrahams et al. 2019). Third
and finally, there should be greater consideration of ways that race and ethnicity may shape the
manifestation and measurement of personality in young people. A strong literature has emerged
on racial and ethnic identity in youth over the past decade (Williams et al. 2012). However, race
and ethnicity should be integrated more generally into the study of personality in children and
adolescents.
7. CONCLUSION
Measurement of personality in children and adolescents is a complicated enterprise and requires
careful consideration of construct validity, measurement source and type, methods of combin-
ing multiple sources of information, challenges of obtaining youth self-reports, and heterotypic
continuity. However, the rich, complex, and meaningful variety of personality differences dis-
played by children and adolescents make it worthwhile and important to take on these assessment
challenges.
DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
R.L.S. is not aware of any affiliations, memberships, funding, or financial holdings that might be
perceived as affecting the objectivity of this review. C.J.S. is a copyright holder for the Big Five
Inventory-2 (BFI-2) and the Behavioral, Emotional, and Social Skills Inventory (BESSI), which
are discussed in this review. F.D.F. receives royalties for the Hierarchical Personality Inventory for
Children (HiPIC), which is discussed in this review.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Preparation of this review was supported by the Charles A. Dana Professorship awarded to R.L.S.
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DP03_TOC ARjats.cls October 26, 2021 11:56
Annual Review
of Developmental
Psychology
Volume 3, 2021
Contents
A Conversation with Michael Rutter

Michael Rutter and Janet F. Werker p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 1
Clinical Staging for Youth Mental Disorders: Progress in Reforming

Diagnosis and Clinical Care

Patrick D. McGorry and Cristina Mei p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p15
Neurodevelopmental Preparedness for Language in the Neonatal
Brain
Caroline Nallet and Judit Gervain p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p41
Interactive Development of Adaptive Learning and Memory
Catherine A. Hartley, Kate Nussenbaum, and Alexandra O. Cohen p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p59
Achievement Motivation: What We Know and Where We Are Going
Allan Wigfield, Katherine Muenks, and Jacquelynne S. Eccles p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p87
Personality Assessment of Children and Adolescents
Rebecca L. Shiner, Christopher J. Soto, and Filip De Fruyt p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 113
Executive Functions in Social Context: Implications for
Conceptualizing, Measuring, and Supporting Developmental
Trajectories
Yuko Munakata and Laura E. Michaelson p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 139
Young Children’s Interactions with Objects: Play as Practice and
Practice as Play
Jeffrey J. Lockman and Catherine S. Tamis-LeMonda p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 165
Contributions of the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study to
Child Development
Sarah James, Sara McLanahan, and Jeanne Brooks-Gunn p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 187
Early Childhood Obesity: A Developmental Perspective
Megan H. Pesch and Julie C. Lumeng p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 207
Asthma as a Developmental Disorder
Fernando D. Martinez p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 229
DP03_TOC ARjats.cls October 26, 2021 11:56
Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience in the Era of Networks and

Big Data: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats
Damien A. Fair, Nico U.F. Dosenbach, Amy H. Moore,
Theodore Satterthwaite, and Michael P. Milham p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 249
Errata
An online log of corrections to Annual Review of Developmental Psychology articles may

be found at http://www.annualreviews.org/errata/devpsych

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Annual Review of Developmental Psychology

and Filip De Fruyt3,4

New York 13346, USA; email: rshiner@colgate.edu

Annu. Rev. Dev. Psychol. 2021. 3:113–37 Keywords

3. SOCIAL, EMOTIONAL, AND BEHAVIORAL SKILLS IN CHILDHOOD

114 Shiner • Soto • De Fruyt

PERSONALITY DOES CHANGE IN CHILDHOOD, ADOLESCENCE, AND

www.annualreviews.org • Personality Assessment of Children and Adolescents 115

1.1. Normative Developmental Changes in Middle Childhood and Adolescence

1.2. Implications of Normative Development for Personality Assessment

116 Shiner • Soto • De Fruyt

2. ASSESSMENT OF TEMPERAMENT AND PERSONALITY TRAITS

www.annualreviews.org • Personality Assessment of Children and Adolescents 117

Plomin 1984) Sociability, Shyness childhood

118 Shiner • Soto • De Fruyt

2.3. Assessment of More-Specific Facet Traits

2.4. Trait Assessment Across Developmental Periods and Informant Perspectives

www.annualreviews.org • Personality Assessment of Children and Adolescents 119

2.5. Alternatives to the Questionnaire Approach

120 Shiner • Soto • De Fruyt

3. SOCIAL, EMOTIONAL, AND BEHAVIORAL SKILLS IN CHILDHOOD

3.1. What Are Social, Emotional, and Behavioral Skills,

www.annualreviews.org • Personality Assessment of Children and Adolescents 121

3.2. Questionnaire Assessment of Social-Emotional-Behavioral Skills

3.3. Assessment of Skill Domains and Facets

122 Shiner • Soto • De Fruyt

Table 2 Prominent questionnaire measures of social-emotional-behavioral skills

Personality Assessment of Children and Adolescents

3.4. Alternatives to Questionnaire Inventories

4. MOTIVATION AND AGENCY: GOALS, VALUES, AND INTERESTS

4.1. Goals: Achievement and Social Strivings

124 Shiner • Soto • De Fruyt

power (Ojanen et al. 2005).

www.annualreviews.org • Personality Assessment of Children and Adolescents 125

126 Shiner • Soto • De Fruyt

5. NARRATIVE IDENTITY: ADOLESCENTS’ LIFE STORIES

5.2. Assessment of Narrative Processing in Adolescents

www.annualreviews.org • Personality Assessment of Children and Adolescents 127

6. A PRIMER ON PERSONALITY ASSESSMENT IN CHILDREN AND

6.1. Back to the Basics: Construct Validity in Youth Personality Assessment

6.2. Sources of Personality Data: Self-Report, Informant Report,

128 Shiner • Soto • De Fruyt

factors (Aichholzer 2014, Soto & John 2017).

6.3. Combining Multiple Sources of Personality Information

www.annualreviews.org • Personality Assessment of Children and Adolescents 129

6.4. Lower Limits on Verbal Self-Report Measures in Children and Alternative

(Davis-Kean et al. 2009). It is therefore typically easier to obtain self-reports of personality in

6.5. Addressing Heterotypic Continuity

6.6. Future Directions: State Measurement, Cross-Cultural Assessment,

130 Shiner • Soto • De Fruyt

www.annualreviews.org • Personality Assessment of Children and Adolescents 131

132 Shiner • Soto • De Fruyt

www.annualreviews.org • Personality Assessment of Children and Adolescents 133

134 Shiner • Soto • De Fruyt

www.annualreviews.org • Personality Assessment of Children and Adolescents 135

pp. 113–41. New York: Oxford Univ. Press

136 Shiner • Soto • De Fruyt

Annu. Rev. Dev. Psychol. 3:87–111

www.annualreviews.org • Personality Assessment of Children and Adolescents 137

A Conversation with Michael Rutter

Clinical Staging for Youth Mental Disorders: Progress in Reforming

Diagnosis and Clinical Care