PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

Breaking down old barriers, today there is a common consent that personality is marked by both stability and change over time as well as across situations. Provided with this basic understanding, the field of personality psychology has moved from debating whether personality changes at all towards answering more sophisticated questions. That is, recent questions at issue are not whether personality is stable or changes but when, how, and why personality and related constructs change or remain stable over time and across situations. This dissertation comprises four manuscripts that address a choice of these current questions considering both long-term and short-term approaches to stability and change. The first three manuscripts focus on questions concerning long-term stability and change in personality traits across the life course. My fourth manuscript, on the other hand, attends to issues concerning short-term stability and change in personality states as apparent in the stream of people's daily lives. Despite the flexible treatment of different aspects and types of personality stability and change, the four studies share one common ground, namely the underlying model of personality. That is, in each of the four studies, personality is considered and assessed in terms of the five-factor model of personality. Thus, beyond their specific contributions to research into personality stability and change, the four studies forming my dissertation also provide some further evidence for the adequacy and usefulness of the Big Five framework to study stability and change in relatively enduring trait-structures as well as in fluctuating state-processes of personality. Considering the results of the four studies in their entirety, some broader implications can be derived in order to proceed with future research into the patterns, sources, and processes of personality development. In particular, the findings as a whole argue for an integration of long- and short-term approaches to personality stability and change. Adopting an all-inclusive life-span perspective, this merger promises to provide new insights into so far relatively uncharted issues of the effective within-person processes underlying personality development.