Early temperament in parental report and scientific observation

ABSTRACT

Early temperament predicts various aspects of development. In large-scale studies, temperament is often assessed via parental report because naturalistic and structured observations are costly and bear the risk of subject loss. However, the validity of such parental reports has been disputed repeatedly. This article compared parental reports on Negative Affectivity and Orienting/Regulation with three naturalistic observations and a Still-Face Paradigm. It thereby investigated the role of situational similarity on the congruence of assessment approaches while controlling selected covariates. Results showed that whereas parental reports merely reflected naturalistic observations, they strongly predicted child behaviour in the SFP. Negative mood was highly volatile over the observed situations whereas motor activity showed some consistency. In sum, the results underline the importance of kind and intensity of stimulus for consistency and visibility of temperament and support the validity of parental reports on early temperament by demonstrating that these reports can predict observable child behaviour.

KEYWORDS:

• Early temperament
• parental report
• observational assessment
• Still-Face Paradigm

Acknowledgements

This paper uses data from the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS): Starting Cohort Newborns, doi:10.5157/NEPS:SC1:3.0.0. From 2008 to 2013, NEPS data was collected as part of the Framework Programme for the Promotion of Empirical Educational Research funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). As of 2014, NEPS is carried out by the Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories (LIfBi) at the University of Bamberg in cooperation with a nationwide network.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Jan-David Freund is a research assistant at the University of Bamberg’s Chair of Developmental Psychology where he is working in the DFG supported ViVA Project (DFG Priority Programme 1646 – Education as a Lifelong Process).

ORCID

Jan-David Freund http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5402-5874

Notes

1 doi: 10.5157/NEPS:SC1:3.0.0. From 2008 to 2013, NEPS data was collected as part of the Framework Program for the Promotion of Empirical Educational Research funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). As of 2014, NEPS is carried out by the Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories (LIfBi) at the University of Bamberg, Germany, in cooperation with a nationwide network.

2 All questions available at: https://www.neps-data.de/en-us/datacenter/dataanddocumentation/startingcohortnewborns/documentation.aspx

3 Available at: https://www.neps-data.de/Portals/0/Working%20Papers/WP_LVIII.pdf

4 Available at: https://www.neps-data.de/Portals/0/Working%20Papers/WP_LVI.pdf

5 ‘Video-based Validity Analyses of Measures of Early Childhood Competencies and Home Learning Environment’ (ViVA) – project funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG, grant to S. Weinert) within Priority Programme 1646.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft: [WE 1478/7-2/AOBJ: 615659].