Personality type, social relationships, and problem behaviour in adolescence

Abstract

In a number of recent studies on personality in childhood and adolescence, comparable personality types have been distinguished. The three types that are repeatedly found can be labelled as: resilient, overcontrolled, and undercontrolled. Using data from a short-term longitudinal study of 569 adolescents, we investigated the transactions between type membership and perceived family and peer support and coercion in predicting problem behaviour, and the concomitants of stability and change in type membership. Resilients report the most perceived support from family members and from friends and the lowest parental coercion. Overcontrollers and undercontrollers report similarly low levels of support and undercontrollers report the highest amount of parental coercion. The types also differ in their psychosocial functioning, with overcontrollers and undercontrollers showing more internalizing and social problems and undercontrollers additionally showing more externalizing problems. Interactions between type and support in predicting the level of problem behaviour were found; support seemed more relevant for overcontrollers, and coercion more for resilients and undercontrollers. Type membership was moderately stable over a period of three years, a stability that in several instances seems to be related to perceived relational support and to problem behaviour.

Notes

We recognize that we might have problems of dependency in that 50% of the children are from the same family and reporting on their relational support about the same parents and that also the parent reports on problem behaviour are also dependent in that the parents provide reports on two children. It should be noted that we also conducted all second phase analyses (i.e., those that examine correlates of the types) on a sample of adolescents in which only one child per family was randomly selected. Results from this random sample were virtually the same as the full sample. We used the full sample in order to ensure sufficient statistical power for our analyses involving identifying factors related to stability and change in types across adolescence.