Personality traits predicting children's social behaviour in the first grade

The paper presents concurrent predictive relations of personality traits with social behaviour of children at the transition from early to middle childhood. Personality ratings of firstgraders (N = 316) were collected using the Inventory of Child and Adolescent Individual Differences (Zupančič & Kavčič, 2009) and the Social Competence and Behaviour Evaluation Scale (La Freniere et al., 2001) was employed to obtain assessments on the children's social competence, internalizing behaviour, and externalizing behaviour. To account for the same rater bias, the children's personality and social behaviour were rated by both teachers and assisstent teachers in the first grade of a nine-year compulsory school; the predictions were based on two sets of their cross-ratings. The firstgraders' social competentnce was consistently (over the cross-ratings) predicted by high conscientiousness, mainly due to ratings of child compliance, whereas low conscientiousness was predictive of internalizing behaviour, especially due to low ratings of subjectively perceived child intelligence. Disagreeableness (both antagonism and strong will) and low neuroticism contributed to assessments of the observed children's externalizing behaviour. In regard to neuroticism, ratings of child fear/insecurity were positively related to externalizing and ratings of child shyness were negatively associated with the observed incidence of externalizing behaviour.