Lives Through Time

J. Block

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317766452
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

First published in 1983. The theme of this study is the importance of studying personality development and personality change in a differentiated way, of identifying and understanding the alternative paths along which people evolve over time. The time is adolescence, with its implications for the life that is later led. And the method is longitudinal. an approach that can respond to questions regarding psychological development not otherwise scientifically accessible.

Chapter I

INTENTIONS AND ORIENTATION

This book is oriented around a theme, a time, and a method. The theme is the importance of studying personality development and personality change in a differentiated way, of identifying and understanding the alternative paths along which people evolve over time. The time is adolescence, with its implications for the life that is later led. And the method is longitudinal, an approach that can respond to questions regarding psychological development not otherwise scientifically accessible.

THE THEME OF DIFFERENT COURSES OF PERSONALITY DEVELOPMENT

It is an instructive, somewhat wry experience to attend a high school reunion twenty years after one’s graduation. In the passage of almost a generation, the capriciousness of adolescence has been left and lives have taken their essential form and direction. There are the usual indicators of the passage and action of time—the formerly lissome and lithe may now be pudgy and stiff; the great adolescent dreams of glamour and omnipotence largely have been deflated by reality; for most, money, comfort, and status have become the order of the day. But such observations taken alone are too simple, too gross, and too established to be sufficiently true.

Although many friends from adolescence have become the kind of person implicitly anticipated long before, others have not. The class literary esthete went into public relations work. Why? The tense, big-boned, not really attractive girl at seventeen is now, two decades later, a sophisticated, intellectual, sex-radiating woman, while the classically pert and pretty cheerleader of yesteryear is several times divorced and older, yet less changed than she should be. Why?

There are psychological mysteries that will remain mysteries, but there are others—such as the different ways in which personality can evolve over time or the conditions and consequences of personality change—into which we can delve more than we yet have. Developmental psychology has been slow to move toward an understanding of these complexities, and later in this chapter some reasons why this is so will be proposed. For the present, the reader need simply note the explicit and programmatic concern of the present study to trace, more closely than before, the ways of personality development and change from adolescence to adulthood.

THE TIME OF ADOLESCENCE

Adolescence is a poignant time, celebrated by poets and returned to often in memory by the rest of us. No longer a child and not yet an adult, the adolescent must confront a surge of, for him, unique emotions, while responding to the increasing responsibilities imposed by his culture. Although the child enters adolescence with a personality already appreciably formed, he enters a time of maturational turbulence, of multiple conflicting and compelling role demands, of a world widening beckoningly and frighteningly before his eyes. Contrary to the view still largely held within psychoanalysis, with its emphasis on the irreversible and determinative significance for character formation of the first few years, adolescence is a time of considerable change and considerable consequence. Contrary to the cumulative, continuous view of personality evolvement held within reinforcement theory, which heavily influences the field of developmental psychology, adolescence is a time often of dramatic personality flux, consolidation, and redirection.

Erikson (1956; 1963) and Blos (1962), in their perceptive essays on the adolescent experience, have helped redress the over-emphasis on continuity in personality development. In their reflections on identity achievement, adolescent experimentation, and the ways in which adolescents come to recognize the limitations on life’s possibilities, these writers have introduced a humane wisdom that has informed and helped many adolescents and their elders.

But the way of psychological science requires more than clinical insights developed in unusual circumstances with perhaps atypical teenagers. Rather, a cumbersome, simplistic, distancing research design and methodology must be invoked to guard against the persuasiveness of clinical perceptions per se and to establish the scope and the limits, the generalizations and the exceptions to what is known about adolescence and its consequences. One’s existential sense of adolescence is diminished by this approach, but another kind of confidence is gained.

The study before you was undertaken in order to investigate adolescence, personality change and later adjustment in a large number of boys and girls followed longitudinally from their junior high school years to the time they were well established in career and in family. We know reasonably well how these individuals turned out and what kind of people they are. Are there clues in the nature of their adolescent years and in their origins that can tell us why these men and women developed as they did?

THE METHOD OF LONGITUDINAL STUDY

The investigator who would embark upon a longitudinal study of human development must be imbued with a rare sense of dedication and selflessness. The motivations for not initiating a longitudinal research program are many. The inertial problems of locating and maintaining a proper subject sample are oppressive; the would-be longitudinal researcher must make fundamental procedural decisions in the Now that are only gambles into the future; he knows that, despite his contemporary sophistication, retrospective wisdom a generation later will make him appear outdated; quick, neat research possibilities that are not longitudinal seductively compete for his attention and promise more immediate professional rewards; and finally, inescapably, there is a recognition that much of the harvest of one’s efforts may be realized in another’s lifetime—these are some of the reasons why longitudinal studies are few, rarely prolonged, and of fluctuating quality over time.

And yet, magnetically, psychologists are now increasingly drawn toward longitudinal studies for the ineluctable reason that there simply is no other way by which certain questions regarding development, cause and effect may be approached. Correlational, cross-sectional, or experimental methods have great and suggestive contributions to make toward an understanding of the bases of behavior. But these approaches do not encompass time and the trajectory of individual lives. It would be pleasant if the world were differently arranged; it is not, and so the burdens of longitudinal study must, albeit perhaps reluctantly, be accepted and endured by psychology. When the long season of waiting has been survived and the data are in, then the excitement of the longitudinal approach begins. Time is surmounted; in a richly-detailed longitudinal study, belated or unanticipated questions can be asked and their answer found quickly in data collected many years before. The payment, in patience and barrenness during the beginning or middle of the longitudinal study, can be justified at its end when a flood of questions finds answers not otherwise providable.

The present book is a major, integrative report of the findings developed to date in the course of two still on-going longitudinal studies conducted at the Institute of Human Development (IHD). The one study was initiated and monitored, until his retirement, by the late Professor Harold Jones; the second study was begun and directed, until her retirement, by Professor Jean Macfarlane and thereafter by Dr. Marjorie Honzik. In late 1960, I was invited to assume the responsibility for organizing a comprehensive and systematic study of the early and contemporaneous archival material relating to the personalities of the longitudinally-studied IHD subjects.

Longitudinal studies will always be hard to come by. Few have been reported before this one, and the foreseeable future will not add many to this small number. Because longitudinal studies are so rare, they invariably attract interest and have significant impact upon the field of human development. Any research, however, is importantly influenced by the preconceptions and premises of the investigator. In view of the influence the results of longitudinal studies can have, it is well to indicate the several kinds of orientation—conceptual and methodological—which have conditioned the analyses and the way in which the findings are reported. But first, it will be useful to describe briefly some earlier longitudinal studies and their circumstances so that a frame of reference is provided within which the present research may be evaluated.

PREVIOUS LONGITUDINAL STUDIES OF PERSONALITY DEVELOPMENT

To date, there are three reports from longitudinal studies that have followed, with some effort toward comprehensiveness, the personality development of a sample of subjects from childhood or adolescence into adulthood. These are: (1) the volume of Kagan and Moss (1962) reporting the findings developed at the Fels Research Institute; (2) the account by Symonds and Jensen (1961) of their Columbia study; and (3) the monograph by Tuddenham (1959) describing some personality continuities observed within the IHD study directed by H. E. Jones. Other longitudinal studies have focussed on intelligence rather than personality (e.g., Terman and Oden, 1959) or shorter time spans (e.g., Witkin, Gooden-ough, and Karp, 1967) or different stages of life (e.g., Neugarten and associates, 1964). A useful summary of the extant longitudinal investigations is provided by Kagan (1964).

The Kagan and Moss Fels Study is by far the most ambitious and extensive of these studies, and it well illustrates both the contributions and the complications attending the longitudinal enterprise.

The Fels subject sample consisted originally of 89 children from 63 different families. Forty-five of the subjects were supplied by only 19 families, the consanguinity within the sample being further enhanced by the inclusion of a set of triplet boys of unstated zygosity. Subjects were closely studied from birth to the age of 14 years. The media employed included intelligence tests, projective tests, and interviews and narrative accounts of the child at school, in the Fels Institute context and at home. These longitudinal data were divided into four sections for the age periods—birth to three years, three to six years, six to ten years, and ten to fourteen years. One psychologist—the same for all cases—then studied the longitudinal material for each subject and, for each time period, rated the subject with respect to four broad classes of personality variables: motive-related behaviors, sources of anxiety, defensive responses, and modes of social interaction.

In a follow-up study, conducted when the Fels subjects were at an average age of 24 years (range from 19 to 29 years), 36 of the males and 35 of the females were interviewed by a different, but still solitary, psychologist. This interviewer expressed his assessments of each subject in the form of ratings on 39 variables. These 39 variables, after being screened for reliability, were reduced to the set of 27 dimensions used in subsequent analyses. Additional data—projective, tachistoscopic, cognitive, autonomic, and inventory—were collected after the interview sessions from varying numbers of subjects. However, the primary focus of the Kagan and Moss analyses and report is on the several sets of personality ratings and on the correlations between broadly similar or related rating variables characterizing subjects in their mid-twenties and in their childhood or adolescence.

The positive findings reported by Kagan and Moss are many and provocative. Some of their results will be cited in apposite places later, but the interested reader will have to consult their work for a full account of their substantive results. The review of the Fels study by Honzik (1965) is especially useful, for it evaluates the Kagan and Moss methodology and data interpretations and summarizes many of the findings, placing them in the larger longitudinal perspective. In the comments now to follow, Honzik’s remarks have been heavily leaned upon.

The limitations of the Fels study are several, some unavoidable and others, perhaps, reflecting simply differences in the aesthetics of, or orientations towards, data analysis. Although the ratings of personality are central to the Kagan and Moss design, yet each set of ratings was made by only one rater. While partial checks on the consensual validity of these individual judges were made by other raters, it is not at all clear that these tests of inter-rater agreement were extensive or independent enough to warrant the total reliance ultimately placed on the single rater, with all the systematic idiosyncracies in personality assessment he may introduce. Particularly unfortunate was the use of the same rater for all of the four time periods defining childhood and early adolescence. Despite intervening ratings of other subjects, the judge, in returning to the new material describing a previously evaluated subject would still carry to an unknown extent memories of the essential way the subject had been characterized earlier. The independence between the childhood-adoles-ence ratings by the one rater and the early adulthood ratings by the other rater is clear and is the strength of the Fels study; the dependence, to an unknown extent, among the several sets of ratings for the four childhood and adolescent periods must leave uncertainty in regard to the relations among these developmental intervals.

Consanguinity within the Fels subject sample is, as Honzik has noted, especially troublesome because it operates to inflate correlation coefficients. Its extent among the subjects studied as adults is not indicated, but the consanguinity effect may have been further increased since the participation of siblings, as adults, is likely to be strongly linked. If one sibling participates, the other is likely to as well. Honzik has suggested a re-analysis of these data, restricting the sample to include only one child from a family; however, carrying out this suggestion would reduce the Fels sample of 71 adult subjects (including both sexes) by something like one-third, and the remaining sample would be frustratingly small.

The Kagan and Moss variables rated during childhood-adolescence and during early adulthood are not clearly spelled out. They are further grouped or clustered into classes of variables that sometimes seem amorphous or counter-intuitive and, most importantly, the variables describing the subjects as adults are different from the variables used to describe the subjects at earlier periods. Although broad equivalences exist between the variables from the earlier and later periods, these are by no means entirely clear and necessarily introduce another uncertainty.

The age and life stage of the Fels subjects at the time of the Kagan and Moss study pose another problem. At an average age of 24, with an age range from 19 to 29, the subjects probably have not yet settled down and may not have attained the style of adaptation that will characterize their later lives. In contemporary America, a quarter of a century is spent before an individual is expected or expects himself to fix his life’s course. The early and middle twenties are, more than ever, times of personal experimentation with a moratorium being benignly or indifferently permitted the seekers for identity. The relationships found by the Fels investigators to characterize the early adulthood of their subjects, although of great interest, may well change radically as these subjects are assessed again a half-generation later. Subsequent assessments, if carried through, will bear upon this strong possibility.

Finally, the small samples of men and women available in the Fels study prevent the attempt to identify patterns of personality development, i.e., the finding of homogeneous subgroups within the larger undifferentiated sample. Instead, the Fels investigators were restricted to straightforward correlational analysis employing the full samples available. Although correlations employing the full sample are usually interesting, and are often sufficiently useful or descriptive, such correlations can be misleading when fundamentally different subtypes exist within the larger sample. The Fels sample sizes at early adulthood (36 men and 35 women) precluded an evaluation of this more differentiated view of personality and its lines of development.

Having summarized the several qualifications that must surround the Kagan and Moss findings, the uniqueness and great psychological interest of their study must again be emphasized. The methodological concerns noted may introduce certain interpretive uncertainties, but they are by no means vitiating of the Fels enterprise. The spirit and intention of the Kagan and Moss inquiry is well conveyed by their remarks: “We view this research report primarily as a source of new hypotheses and not as an almanac of facts. It is an invitation to our colleagues to select ideas according to their taste and to submit to more rigorous testing the provocative hunc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Preface
• Table of Contents
• Chapter I: Intentions and Orientation
• Chapter II. The People Studied
• Chapter III: The Archival Material and the Consequent Research Approach
• Chapter IV: The Judging Process
• Chapter V: Personality Attributes Studied over Time
• Chapter VI: Personality Consistency and Change over Time as a Moderator Variable of Longitudinal Trends
• Chapter VII: Courses of Personality Development—Rationale, Methodology, and Background
• Chapter VIII: Courses of Personality Development—The Male Sample
• Chapter IX: Courses of Personality Development—The Female Sample
• Chapter X: Taking Stock
• Bibliography
• Appendices