engleski

Adolescent’s personality and disclosure to parents

Prior research links parents’ knowledge about adolescent’s daily activities to numerous dimensions of adolescent adjustment, including lower problem behavior and higher well-being. Parents’ knowledge appears to originate mainly from adolescents’ disclosure, which involves spontaneously revealing information to parents (Stattin & Kerr, 2000). Thus, a key issue is that of the determinants of youth self-disclosure to parents. Previous research has shown the importance of youth’s gender and age, but research on the role of adolescents’ personality in predicting their self-disclosure to parents is scarce. The present study was designed to examine the relations between adolescents’ personality and their disclosure to mothers and fathers. The Big Five dimensions (Costa & McCrae, 1992 ; Norman, 1963) were used as they are considered representative of much of the variation in human personality. However, dimensional approaches fail to take into account the configuration of the characteristics within a person ; thus, we used a person-centered approach to identify the dominant clusters of adolescents’ personality traits. The sample consisted of 1074 adolescents (13 year-olds) from 50 schools in Croatia (probabilistic cluster sample), who provided their self-ratings on the Big Five dimensions: extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability and openness to experience – intellect (Scholte, van Aken & van Lieshout, 1997). Adolescents also reported on their disclosure to their mothers and fathers about their daily activities (Stattin & Kerr, 2000) as well as feelings and concerns (Kerr, Stattin & Trost, 1999). The variable-centered approach resulted in small to moderate correlations between disclosure to mothers and fathers with adolescent’s agreeableness, conscientiousness and openness (rs = .18 – .31). However, zero to very small correlations were found between disclosure and the extraversion and emotional stability dimensions. The person-centered approach revealed four clusters. The first one is characterized by its very low scores on extraversion and emotional stability and below-average scores on the other dimensions (n = 198). The second one has pronounced scores on extraversion and emotional stability and above-average scores on the other dimensions (n = 375). The third one is characterized by below-average extraversion, average emotional stability and above-average agreeableness, conscientiousness and openness (n = 238). The fourth cluster is characterized by pronouncedly low scores on agreeableness and conscientiousness, slightly above-average scores on extraversion, average emotional stability and below-average openness (n = 251). These clusters correspond to overcontrolled, resilient, confident and undercontrolled personality prototypes, extracted in previous research on adults (Roth & Herzberg, 2007). Additional analyses indicated that adolescents in clusters 1 and 3 (resilient and confident) disclosed significantly more to their mothers and fathers about their daily activities as well as feelings and concerns compared to adolescents in clusters 2 and 4 (undercontrolled and overcontrolled). The configurations of dimensions within clusters provide an explanation for the unexpected zero correlations between disclosure and emotional stability and extraversion. The results highlight the importance of taking into account the configuration of adolescents’ personality characteristics when studying their disclosure to parents. Future research should examine how different adolescent personality types might require or provoke different parental approaches in facilitating their disclosure.

adolescents’ personality; disclosure to mothers and fathers; Big Five dimensions; person-centered approach; cluster analysis; parenting

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