Contextual Influences on personality development during the transition from university to work

• Applicant: Dr. Anne Reitz
• Subject Area: Personality Psychology, Clinical and Medical Psychology, Methodology ; Developmental and Educational Psychology
• Term: from 2015 to 2017
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 290152750

Personality has long been thought to be stable. Only recently longitudinal research demonstrated that personality develops and changes over the lifespan and that people differ in their personality development. However, this research remains largely descriptive of the average and differential changes. Not much is known about why personality changes. In the proposed project, I aim to address this question by studying the role of the changing social contexts. Integrating approaches from lifespan theory and personality psychology, I plan to investigate how a major life transition, the transition from university to work, drives personality development in young adulthood, the life phase in which personality changes the most. Specifically, I aim to examine how this transition unfolds in daily life in order to get insights into the processes triggered by the contextual changes during the transition. This requires the use of high-resolution prospective longitudinal studies that combine long-term and frequent short-term assessments (i.e., intensive longitudinal data). I therefore plan to use such a intensive longitudinal data set that assessed a broad range of personality and contextual constructs both on a yearly- and a daily-basis across the transition to work. This data will allow me to address three major research questions that will guide my proposed research: 1) How does the transition to work affect normative personality development? 2) What are the individual differences in personality development during the transition to work? And 3) What are the mechanisms underlying the normative change and individual differences in change upon the transition to work, such as changes in personality states, social relationships, motives, and affect? With support from two leading experts on daily diary methods, I will apply multilevel modeling methods to analyze these questions. In sum, I believe that the results of this project have the potential to significantly contribute to our understanding of the mechanisms underlying (individual differences in) personality development during the transition from university to work. Hence, this project can help to provide new insights into why personality changes across the lifespan.

• DFG Programme: Research Fellowships
• International Connection: USA
• Host: Professor Dr. Patrick E. Shrout