Differentiation as discrepancies in adolescent’s perceptions of patience: An illustration of response surface analysis

ABSTRACT

Situational variation is consistently leveled as a criticism of character research and theory. Across adolescence, young people’s realization that they may display certain character strengths in some relational contexts (e.g., with peers) but not in others (e.g., with parents) may reflect a normative, underlying process of differentiation. Using a diverse sample 618 adolescents, their mother, a peer, and nonfamilial adult, we used Response Surface Analysis (RSA) to examine associations between pairs of informant reports of patience and indicators of positive and negative functioning and how these associations varied with age. With increasing age, adolescents become more realistic in patience self-ratings. Results begin to shed light on both contextual and age-related differences in young people’s patience and the continued need for theoretically grounded, developmentally informed research.

KEYWORDS:

• Character strengths
• adolescents
• response surface analysis
• informant discrepancies
• positive youth development

Acknowledgments

We thank Judith Smetana and her graduate students for discussions of the original ideas and helpful suggestions on the manuscript. This publication was made possible through the support of a grant from the John Templeton Foundation under Grant [61221]. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the John Templeton Foundation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

1. It is important to note that recent literature (e.g., Humberg et al., 2019, in press) suggests caution in interpreting individual RSA parameters given that these parameters alone do not constitute significance testing, especially for making conclusions about the direction of mismatch. In the current literature, practices regarding RSA (e.g., appropriate effect sizes; exploratory analyses for cubic effects) are still being developed and refined (Humberg et al., in press). Presently, there is little in the way of exploratory hypothesis testing for establishing the direction of mismatch based on formal testing. As such, our findings are interpreted from the three-dimensional figures generated by the data (Figure 1–6) in an exploratory manner.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the John Templeton Foundation [61221].