Carving personality description at its joints: Confirmation of three replicable personality prototypes for both children and adults

We tested the hypothesis that there are three major prototypic patterns of personality description (resilient, overcontrolled, and undercontrolled) in a series of studies including adults' self-descriptions on the Big Five an d parents' Big Five and Q-Sort judgments of their childern, using both repl icated cluster analyses and replicated Q-factor analyses. The consistency o f the prototypes across ages, judges, and methods was quantitatively measur ed. The results confirmed the hypothesis in all studies. Personality social relationship, and social interaction correlates of the prototypes indicate d externalizing tendencies for undercontrollers and internalizing tendencie s for overcontrollers for both childern and adults. The studies provide str ong evidence for a three-prototype model of personality description at the highest level of analysis for both childhood and adulthood. Copyright (C) 2 001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.