Assessing personality in early adolescence through self-report and other-ratings a multitrait-multimethod analysis of the BFQ-C

The main purpose of this paper is to provide an assessment of the Big Five Questionnaire – Children construct validity by means of a multitrait-multimethod study among junior high school preadolescents from 13 to 14 years old. Self-report, teacher and parent ratings were gathered. Confirmatory Factor Analyses were performed to study convergent and discriminant validity. The so-called Correlated Uniquenesses model resulted in an adequate fit to the empirical data. Convergent validity was supported for all factors, especially between preadolescents and their parents. Discriminant validity is achieved only in a “weak” sense since the high correlation between Intellect/Openness and Conscientiousness. Furthermore results indicate that method effect is not negligible for all raters and all traits.