Continuity and Stability in Early Social Development: II. Teacher Ratings

The dimensionality, continuity, and stability of personality were determined from repeated teacher ratings of the same 53 middle-class children during 2 years of nursery school. Factor and longitudinal analyses revealed that Aggression-Dominance, Dependency, and Autonomy are continuous and stable dimensions throughout this period. There was also evidence for discontinuity in the bipolar counterpart of autonomy, from initial reactive hostility to later instrumental dependency. This structural shift was accompanied by personality change in non-autonomous boys. The results support the view that traits become established early in life but may be subject to specific transformations during certain periods of development. An earlier study integrated the concepts of behavioral continuitydiscontinuity and individual stability-instability into a fourfold scheme for developmental analysis (Emmerich, 1964). This framework was applied to a short-term longitudinal study of early social development, based upon systematic observations of the social behavior of children in the nursery-school setting. The present study extends this approach to a different source of data on the same subjects, that of teacher ratings. First, the dimensionality and continuity of social behavior are examined by means of independent factor analyses of teacher ratings of the same children in each of four semesters of nursery school. The extent of trait stability is then determined by looking at the correlations among factors having similar structure in all four semesters.