Structure of Personality Across Adolescence

People care a great deal about studying personality development during adolescence. Neuroscientists like looking at the developing brain in relation to personality development (Montag et al., 2013), while educators are interested in improving the socio-emotional skills during adolescence (Duff et al., 2004). It’s important to understand how the structure of personality changes across adolescence before we base so much on personality alone. Much of the existing research on personality development gives us an indication of normative personality structure development; however, there is less understood about the evolution of personality traits and to what extent different components of each trait remain stable across time. In the present study, we use a large-scale dataset to study the stability (or change) of personality structure during adolescence. We take a network approach to quantify and visualize personality structure; this allows us to estimate the stability of structure across several metrics (e.g., centrality and edge weights). We also use community detection methods to empirically estimate factors.