PERSONALITY TRAITS AND IDENTITY STATUS OF ADOLESCENTS: A PERSON-CENTERED APPROACH

Abstract

This research aimed to clarify the relationship between adolescent personality traits as measured by “Big Five Plus Two” inventory based on psycholexical studies of Serbian language, and identity status as defined in the theoretical and empirical works of Erik Erikson and James Marcia. The sample of the research consisted of N = 201 adolescents, aged 16 to 21, with an average age of M = 18.32, SD = 1.12. The instruments used were The Ego Identity Process Questionnaire and Big Five Plus Two - short version, an instrument based on lexical studies of Serbian language. Cluster analysis was used to classify adolescents according to identity maturity with an implicit goal of identifying adolescents who are predisposed towards successful or unsuccessful adaptation to identity tasks by their personality traits. The result showed that two clusters could be identified. The first cluster consisted of N = 125 adolescents who scored low on both commitment and exploration and this group was therefore named “undifferentiated identity status adolescents”. Regarding the personality traits, the typical pattern in this cluster was low openness to experience, as well as marked negative valence. The second cluster consisted of N = 76 adolescents which scored high on both commitment and exploration dimensions of identity; the cluster was named “mature identity status adolescents”. Their personality traits patterns were almost the opposite of the first group: high openness to experience and low negative valence were typical of this group. Therefore two conclusions are made from the results: (1) personality dimension openness to experience seems to be especially important in resolving identity tasks in adolescence, and it is possible to suggest that it corresponds to exploration based on their correlation; (2) identity maturity seems to be an important correlate of psychological well-being in adolescence, given that two groups differed sharply on the negative valence dimension and that less mature identity status adolescents typically scored higher scores on this trait. Keywords: identity status, personality traits, adolescence, person-centered approach