TRACING THE BIG 5 IN PARENTS FREE DESCRIPTIONS OF THEIR CHILDREN

Because of the impressive replicability of the Five-Factor Model (FFM) in adult personality psychology, developmental psychologists have rec ently begun a search for the antecedents of these five adult dimension s in childhood The FFM originates in rating scales applied to 'persona lity words', notably adjectives, selected from dictionaries. To test t he explanatory power of the FFM as a model for individual differences in childhood, we used a different source for the lexicon of personalit y. Parents of children aged 3, 6, 9, and 12 years were asked simply 't o describe your child'. The audiotaped interviews were transcribed lit erally and then coded using an elaborate coding scheme. We here descri be data from three of the countries involved in this cross-cultural pr oject (Holland Belgium, and Greece). The data are the results of codin g free descriptions for a total of 186 3-year-olds and 229 9-year-olds . These data represent the first phase of a four-phase project that in cludes researchers from The Netherlands, Belgium, Greece, Poland, Germ any, the USA, and China. Results from this first phase were very simil ar over the participating countries although there were some interesti ng culture-specific differences. In the second phase, questionnaire it ems based on the free descriptors in each category of the coding schem e will be written by the research teams.