Journal of Youth and Adolescence, VoL 6, No. 4, 1977
Adolescent Personality Antecedents of Completed Family Size" A Longitudinal Study 1 Norman Livson 2 and David Day a
Received March 7, 1977
Comprehensive personality assessments, made independently for early and late adolescence, were employed to predict the subsequent family sizes o f 52 women and 54 men with single continuous marriages throughout their parenting careers. (These participants have been studied longitudinally over a 40-year span in either the Oakland Growth Study or the Berkeley Guidance Study.) Final family size relates negligibly to earlier personality for men, but is substantially predictable for women from several personality dimensions. Of particular interest are the highly significant positive correlations demonstrated with intellectual competence o f girls at both adolescent age levels and independently within the two cohorts studied. Alternative hypotheses to account for this unexpected result are presented, and further research is proposed to determine whether the relationship is cohort-specific (to women born in the 1920s) or, instead, likely to hoM for current and future generations o f women.
INTRODUCTION "The prediction of family s i z e . . , from psychological measures on individuals is clearly an unsolved problem at the present time" (Gough, 1973, This research was supported by Grant HD 09191-01 from the U.S. Public Health Service. ZThe data employed are drawn from the longitudinal archives of the Oakland Growth Study and the Berkeley Guidance Study, both at the Institute of Human Development, Universityof California, Berkeley. Research Psychologist, Institute of Human Development, University of California, Berkeley, and Professor and Chair, Department of Psychology, California State University, Hayward. Main research interest is the longitudinal study of personality development. 3Data Analyst, Institute of Human Development, University of California, Berkeley, and California State University, Hayward. Research areas include personality theory and development and the psychology of coping. 311 This journal is copyrighted by Plenum. Each article is available for $7.50 from Plenum Publishing Corporation, 2 2 7 West 17th Street, New Y o r k , N.Y. 10011.
312
Livson and Day
p. 330). This recent verdict, which we hope to mitigate in this report, was based upon a thorough review of the then-available literature. Included among the evidence were the data gathered in two pioneering studies, one in Indianapolis (Whelpton and Kiser, 1946-1958) and in Princeton (Westoff et al., 1963). Since neither of these large-scale classic investigations emphasized psychological assessments, their failure to yield encouraging results in the psychological domain may derive from the use of relatively brief and unsophisticated techniques for measuring personality and motivational factors. Much subsequent research has been relatively guiltless in this respect, yet the yield has been no greater. Our own comprehensive review of literature to date on determinants of completed family size which are, in the broadest sense, "psychological," has detected neither solid results nor even promising leads. Concurrent psychological correlates, among them specific psychological traits and aspects of marital interaction, have been reported (e.g., Back and Hass, 1973; Hoffman and Hoffman, 1973; Rodgers and Ziegler, 1973). But these are not directly relevant to the issue of predicting family size; neither are psychological correlates of such related "population" criteria as contraceptive preferences and usage, and attitudes toward and resort to abortion. Apparently related to our research question are the numerous findings of psychological characteristics that correlate with ideal or preferred family size. But, as we know (e.g., George, 1973), such preferences may bear only a negligible relation to actual completed family size. Finally, nonpsychological predictors of family size (e.g., socioeconomic and demographic) have been reported, but these pertain to levels of analysis other than the one at which we hope to make a contribution. Speculation as to the psychological determinants of family size, ranging from the casual to the theoretically well founded, is not lacking. A notable example is the thorough and imaginative analysis of "The Value of Children to Parents" by Hoffman and Hoffman (1973). The formulations provide, in varying degrees, potential formats which we might have employed to guide an empirical search. But our initial intent, expressed in the design of the present investigation, is to be atheoretical in approach. In so doing, we hope to keep open avenues of search which current conceptualizations might persuade us to ignore. To be sure, however, current theories will be used to guide our interpretation of results and help set further directions of inquiry. To mix a metaphor, our decision to use a shotgun approach on a fishing expedition we believe to be prudent, rather than Philistine. It derives from two working assumptions. First, our research focus is on the prediction of family size from very "inner" and very individual prechildbearing personality characteristics. Beyond prediction, we expect to gain some understanding of what determines the numbers of children women and men choose to rear in their lifetimes from assessments of intrapersonal psychodynamics and interpersonal styles of adolescence. Viewed from this focus, the existing literature is almost mute, as we noted earlier, perhaps justifying its being sidelined for the moment.
Personality Antecedents of Completed Family Size
313
Second, we join in the assertion (advanced by longitudinal researchers and now well supported by empirical data) that retrospective reports collected in adulthood of earlier personality characteristics, and of developmental events, are at best fragile underpinnings for assessing long-term predictive relationships. If we rule such data out, then the literature (so far as we have been able to determine) is totally silent. (Two apparent exceptions-Clausen and Clausen, 1973; Smelser and Livson, 1973 - are based on partial samples from the same longitudinal study participants and data archives to be employed here and can fairly be regarded as essentially subsumed by this report.) In this investigation we tap the archives of two longitudinal studies, each spanning more than 40 years, for any predictions from comprehensive assessments of their participants' adolescent personalities to the sizes of family they chose to rear as adults. In adopting this tactic we have explicitly ignored, with a few exceptions, mediating factors which almost certainly would have increased the magnitude of the association between two such distally related phenomena. To assume, as we have, that some adolescent personality traits can directly predict final family size may seem brash; in part, it exposes our faith in the power of intensive and reliable lifespan longitudinal assessment. Moreover, this approach sets aside Gough's concern (1973) that family size may be the "resultant of too many factors, including accidental factors, to permit accurate forecasting from just the psychological perspective" (p. 331). Fawcett (1970) appears to share our belief in his suggestion that longitudinal studies, beginning in adolescence or even earlier, may contain a wealth of data on the motivational bases for later childbearing. This paper is intended to make a small start in building an empirical foundation to support such optimism.
METHOD Sample: Criteria and Characteristics
The sample was drawn from among the men and women participants in either the Oakland Growth Study (OGS) or the Guidance Study (GS). These longitudinal studies have been carried out at the Institute of Human Development (University of California, Berkeley) for more than 40 years. (Oakland and Berkeley, the sources of the two samples, are immediately adjacent communities in the San Francisco Bay area.) Both studies began systematic data collection of a very broad range of personality, physical, and intellectual characteristics shortly after 1930, when the OGS subjects were about 10-years-old and GS participants were 21 months of age. Both samples were intensively assessed up to adulthood and both have been followed throughout their adult years. (The subjects currently range in age from the late 40s to the late 50s.) On at least
314
Livson and Day
two occasions during adulthood these groups participated in comprehensive assessments and they continue to maintain good contact with the longitudinal study staffs and to provide significant updating information. (For detaile,' descriptions of these samples and of the full spectrum of pre-adult data collection see Jones et al., (1971); for characterizations of both samples in adulthood, see Block and Haan, 1971 .) Three criteria were employed to select our specific samples: (1) the availability of comprehensive personality assessments at both early and late adoles cence; (2) the maintenance of a single continuous marriage throughout one's parenting career (for which we have arbitrarily set age 40 as the end-point); (3) the rearing of at least one child. Application of these criteria yielded a total sample for this report of 106 - 54 men and 52 women. The sample is socioeconomically quite diverse; modally, it is upper middle class, with an occupational range from unskilled workers through professional: and executives, and with an educational range from high school graduation through postgraduate training. (Most participants had some college training.) The sample is about two-thirds Protestant and about 20% Catholic. The majority of the participants come from families with two or fewer children, reflecting the lower family size preferences of the 1920s and 1930s. Adolescent Personality Assessment
Highly reliable, multiple-judge assessments of personality, carried out independently for early adolescence (ages 12 up to 15) and late adolescence (ages 15-18), available from a larger study (Block and Haan, 1971). These c o n sist of composite Q-sorts, based upon "case assemblies" of interview, observational, and test data gathered together separately for the two adolescent age periods and employing the 104-item adolescent version of the California Q-sort (Block, 1961). (.4, Q-sort requires the ordering of a large number of descriptive statements into a prescribed distribution along a dimension of being most to least characteristic of the target person.) The Q-sorts were done by welt-trained clinical professionals and, to assure independence between early and late adolescence assessments, the Q-sorts for the two periods were done by different judges for any given study participant. Each sort at each age period involved at least three judges; when initial agreement among the three fell below acceptable limits, the least consensual judge was dropped and additional judges were assigned. The three were then averaged and the reliability of these composites never fell below a Spearman-Brown corrected r of 0.65. Rather than working with the 208 Q-sort item scores thus available for each study participant (104 items each, at early and late adolescence) we decided to reduce the number of measures while conserving the reliable information they carried. The method chosen was Tryon's cluster analysis technique (Tryon and
personality Antecedents of Completed Family Size
315
Bailey, 1970), which yields the minimal number of oblique dimensions necessary to account for a maximum proportion of the reliable variance within a correlation matrix. (An original procedure was devised and carried out which demonstrated that it was appropriate to seek a single set of clusters to account for the Q-sort item intercorrelations, one which fit each of the 8 correlation matrices generated by the two sexes, the two age levels, and the OGS and GS cohorts.) Therefore, a single cluster analysis was performed upon the total pool of Q-sort data. The result was a set of 11 highly reliable clusters, each defined as the composite of a number of individual Q-sort items. These we named
responsible, nurturant, emotive, intellectually competent, sociable, decisive, self-insightful, somaticizes, eroticizes, physically attractive, and defensive. In addition, eight individual items of high reliability, but of insufficient commonality to join or form clusters, were retained as separate dimensions. These items are moralistic, fantasizes, guilty, aesthetically reactive, represses, poweroriented, behaves sex-appropriately, and involved with same sex. The final product of these several procedures is a single, common set of 19 dimensions which provides comprehensive descriptions of personality at early and late adolescence for boys and girls. This set of measures carries essentially all of the reliable information contained in the original Q-sorts and provides, in our opinion, the potentially most powerful data base from which we can predict family size. Family Size: Considerations and Definition We adopt a "psychological" conceptualization of family size for this study. Specifically, we have defined family size as the total number of children who lived with, and were reared by, the participant substantially throughout their childhood and adolescence and during the course of a single continuous marriage. Included, therefore, are biological offspring as well as any other children, informally or legally adopted, who were raised in the family. Because our latest information as to the number of the children in the home is at least as recent as age 40 and in the majority of cases is current (at a time when the participants are almost 50 years of age, at the youngest), we can safely assume that we are dealing with "f'mal" family size. Not included in the sample are participants who died before age 40, who never married, and who, though married, neither bore nor adopted any children. (Exclusion of these zero-child participants is due partly to their scarcity - 5 men and 6 women - and to the possibility that infertility was the overriding factor in this group.) It should be clear, then, that we are not dealing with adolescent antecedents of fertility, per se, although fertility (as usually defined) and family size (as we have defined it) are no doubt highly correlated. But we suspect that the magnitude of the association, while necessarily substantial, does not assure that
316
Livson and Day
the personality predictors reported here would remain invariant if the actual criterion were fertility. We make this point now only by way of focusing on our assumption that biological and psychological family sizes may be, for conceptual purposes, usefully discriminable constructs, especially in populations where adoption rates are relatively high. In such instances we suggest that early personality measures may show a different predictive pattern when the outcome is, on the one hand, the number of biological offspring and, on the other, an augmentation or substitution of such children by others whose entry onto the family scene characteristically requires somewhat more conscious and deliberate action. By this definition the women in our study have reared an average of 2.9 children; the men, 3.1. These values, slightly inflated by dropping out zero-child families, are clearly in line with national norms for these cohorts, both with respect to actual and preferred family size. The range is from I-8 children, but for our correlational analysis we have treated as equivalent families of 5 or more children.
RESULTS It may be useful to note here that our decision to cluster-analyze the Q-sort data was, in part, based upon the results of preliminary work. Specifically, univariate analyses of variance were carried out for each of the adolescent Q-sort items, separately for each sex and within the two adolescent age periods. Some "significant" relationships were found, but considering that 461 ANOVAS were computed, there were far too few to persuade us that chance levels had been surpassed. (Only a Monte Carlo technique could have generated true chance levels for each set ofintercorrelated variables against which to evaluate the significance of each set of results, and this was economically impractical.) Therefore, we resorted to the information-conserving reduction of the item pool to the much smaller (and more reliable) set of 19 personality dimensions. We report here only the product-moment correlations between these dimensions (separately for early and late adolescence) and family size. Thus, only bivariate and linear predictive relationships from personality to family size are under consideration in this report. We expect, in analyses currently under way, to complicate and enhance the predictive picture by evaluating both multivariate and curvilinear relationships, both within and across the two adolescent periods.
Family Size Prediction from Adolescent Personality: Men The harvest from the correlational analyses of the males' data is quite meager. Indeed, the items which reach conventional standards of statistical
Personality Antecedents of Completed Family Size
317
Table I. Correlations of Personality Dimensions with Family Size-Males a Early adolescence Personality dimension Responsible Nurturant Emotive Intellectual competence Sociable Decisive Self-insightful Somaticizes Eroticizes Physically attractive Defensive Moralistic Fantasizes Guilty Aesthetically reactive Represses Power-oriented Behaves sex-appropriately Involved with same sex
r 0.17 0.16 -0.08 0.16 -0.17 -0.02 0.20 b -0.17 -0.01 0.22 b -0.19 b -0.14 -0.24 c 0.26 c 0.10 -0.02 -0.11 0.08 -0.04
r (IQ)
r (SES)
0.17 0.16 -0.04 0.12 -0.15 -0.01 0.14 -0.14 0.01 0.20 b -0.19 b -0.17 -0.24 c 0.26 c 0.09 0.01 -0.11 0.09 -0.06
0.16 0.16 -0.11 0.10 -0.20 b -0.07 0.20 b -0.16 -0.01 0.22 b -0.16 -0.18 b -0.19 b 0.26 c -0.10 -0.02 -0.14 0.11 -0.01
Late adolescence r 0.18 b -0.02 -0.10 0.19 b -0.04 0.13 -0.08 -0.03 -0.08 0.21 b -0.07 0.18 b -0.06 0.19 b 0.07 0.10 0.15 -0.06 0.07
9 (IQ)
9 (SES)
0.10 -0.08 -0.05 0.12 -0.02 0.13 -0.16 -0.02 -0.04 0.18 h -0.03 0.14 -0.08 0.18 b 0.03 0.13 0.18 -0.09 0.12
0.18 -0.00 -0.14 0.13 -0.05 0.05 -0.08 -0.00 -0.09 0.25c -0.06 0.16 -0.05 0.21b 0.10 0.13 0.12 -0.07 0.03
aColumn r values are product-moment coefficients. Columns r(IQ) and r(SES)are the first-order partial correlations between the dimension and family size, controlling for adolescent IQ and adult socioeconomic status, respectively. bp
Adolescent Personality Antecedents of Completed Family Size" A Longitudinal Study 1 Norman Livson 2 and David Day a
Received March 7, 1977
Comprehensive personality assessments, made independently for early and late adolescence, were employed to predict the subsequent family sizes o f 52 women and 54 men with single continuous marriages throughout their parenting careers. (These participants have been studied longitudinally over a 40-year span in either the Oakland Growth Study or the Berkeley Guidance Study.) Final family size relates negligibly to earlier personality for men, but is substantially predictable for women from several personality dimensions. Of particular interest are the highly significant positive correlations demonstrated with intellectual competence o f girls at both adolescent age levels and independently within the two cohorts studied. Alternative hypotheses to account for this unexpected result are presented, and further research is proposed to determine whether the relationship is cohort-specific (to women born in the 1920s) or, instead, likely to hoM for current and future generations o f women.
INTRODUCTION "The prediction of family s i z e . . , from psychological measures on individuals is clearly an unsolved problem at the present time" (Gough, 1973, This research was supported by Grant HD 09191-01 from the U.S. Public Health Service. ZThe data employed are drawn from the longitudinal archives of the Oakland Growth Study and the Berkeley Guidance Study, both at the Institute of Human Development, Universityof California, Berkeley. Research Psychologist, Institute of Human Development, University of California, Berkeley, and Professor and Chair, Department of Psychology, California State University, Hayward. Main research interest is the longitudinal study of personality development. 3Data Analyst, Institute of Human Development, University of California, Berkeley, and California State University, Hayward. Research areas include personality theory and development and the psychology of coping. 311 This journal is copyrighted by Plenum. Each article is available for $7.50 from Plenum Publishing Corporation, 2 2 7 West 17th Street, New Y o r k , N.Y. 10011.
312
Livson and Day
p. 330). This recent verdict, which we hope to mitigate in this report, was based upon a thorough review of the then-available literature. Included among the evidence were the data gathered in two pioneering studies, one in Indianapolis (Whelpton and Kiser, 1946-1958) and in Princeton (Westoff et al., 1963). Since neither of these large-scale classic investigations emphasized psychological assessments, their failure to yield encouraging results in the psychological domain may derive from the use of relatively brief and unsophisticated techniques for measuring personality and motivational factors. Much subsequent research has been relatively guiltless in this respect, yet the yield has been no greater. Our own comprehensive review of literature to date on determinants of completed family size which are, in the broadest sense, "psychological," has detected neither solid results nor even promising leads. Concurrent psychological correlates, among them specific psychological traits and aspects of marital interaction, have been reported (e.g., Back and Hass, 1973; Hoffman and Hoffman, 1973; Rodgers and Ziegler, 1973). But these are not directly relevant to the issue of predicting family size; neither are psychological correlates of such related "population" criteria as contraceptive preferences and usage, and attitudes toward and resort to abortion. Apparently related to our research question are the numerous findings of psychological characteristics that correlate with ideal or preferred family size. But, as we know (e.g., George, 1973), such preferences may bear only a negligible relation to actual completed family size. Finally, nonpsychological predictors of family size (e.g., socioeconomic and demographic) have been reported, but these pertain to levels of analysis other than the one at which we hope to make a contribution. Speculation as to the psychological determinants of family size, ranging from the casual to the theoretically well founded, is not lacking. A notable example is the thorough and imaginative analysis of "The Value of Children to Parents" by Hoffman and Hoffman (1973). The formulations provide, in varying degrees, potential formats which we might have employed to guide an empirical search. But our initial intent, expressed in the design of the present investigation, is to be atheoretical in approach. In so doing, we hope to keep open avenues of search which current conceptualizations might persuade us to ignore. To be sure, however, current theories will be used to guide our interpretation of results and help set further directions of inquiry. To mix a metaphor, our decision to use a shotgun approach on a fishing expedition we believe to be prudent, rather than Philistine. It derives from two working assumptions. First, our research focus is on the prediction of family size from very "inner" and very individual prechildbearing personality characteristics. Beyond prediction, we expect to gain some understanding of what determines the numbers of children women and men choose to rear in their lifetimes from assessments of intrapersonal psychodynamics and interpersonal styles of adolescence. Viewed from this focus, the existing literature is almost mute, as we noted earlier, perhaps justifying its being sidelined for the moment.
Personality Antecedents of Completed Family Size
313
Second, we join in the assertion (advanced by longitudinal researchers and now well supported by empirical data) that retrospective reports collected in adulthood of earlier personality characteristics, and of developmental events, are at best fragile underpinnings for assessing long-term predictive relationships. If we rule such data out, then the literature (so far as we have been able to determine) is totally silent. (Two apparent exceptions-Clausen and Clausen, 1973; Smelser and Livson, 1973 - are based on partial samples from the same longitudinal study participants and data archives to be employed here and can fairly be regarded as essentially subsumed by this report.) In this investigation we tap the archives of two longitudinal studies, each spanning more than 40 years, for any predictions from comprehensive assessments of their participants' adolescent personalities to the sizes of family they chose to rear as adults. In adopting this tactic we have explicitly ignored, with a few exceptions, mediating factors which almost certainly would have increased the magnitude of the association between two such distally related phenomena. To assume, as we have, that some adolescent personality traits can directly predict final family size may seem brash; in part, it exposes our faith in the power of intensive and reliable lifespan longitudinal assessment. Moreover, this approach sets aside Gough's concern (1973) that family size may be the "resultant of too many factors, including accidental factors, to permit accurate forecasting from just the psychological perspective" (p. 331). Fawcett (1970) appears to share our belief in his suggestion that longitudinal studies, beginning in adolescence or even earlier, may contain a wealth of data on the motivational bases for later childbearing. This paper is intended to make a small start in building an empirical foundation to support such optimism.
METHOD Sample: Criteria and Characteristics
The sample was drawn from among the men and women participants in either the Oakland Growth Study (OGS) or the Guidance Study (GS). These longitudinal studies have been carried out at the Institute of Human Development (University of California, Berkeley) for more than 40 years. (Oakland and Berkeley, the sources of the two samples, are immediately adjacent communities in the San Francisco Bay area.) Both studies began systematic data collection of a very broad range of personality, physical, and intellectual characteristics shortly after 1930, when the OGS subjects were about 10-years-old and GS participants were 21 months of age. Both samples were intensively assessed up to adulthood and both have been followed throughout their adult years. (The subjects currently range in age from the late 40s to the late 50s.) On at least
314
Livson and Day
two occasions during adulthood these groups participated in comprehensive assessments and they continue to maintain good contact with the longitudinal study staffs and to provide significant updating information. (For detaile,' descriptions of these samples and of the full spectrum of pre-adult data collection see Jones et al., (1971); for characterizations of both samples in adulthood, see Block and Haan, 1971 .) Three criteria were employed to select our specific samples: (1) the availability of comprehensive personality assessments at both early and late adoles cence; (2) the maintenance of a single continuous marriage throughout one's parenting career (for which we have arbitrarily set age 40 as the end-point); (3) the rearing of at least one child. Application of these criteria yielded a total sample for this report of 106 - 54 men and 52 women. The sample is socioeconomically quite diverse; modally, it is upper middle class, with an occupational range from unskilled workers through professional: and executives, and with an educational range from high school graduation through postgraduate training. (Most participants had some college training.) The sample is about two-thirds Protestant and about 20% Catholic. The majority of the participants come from families with two or fewer children, reflecting the lower family size preferences of the 1920s and 1930s. Adolescent Personality Assessment
Highly reliable, multiple-judge assessments of personality, carried out independently for early adolescence (ages 12 up to 15) and late adolescence (ages 15-18), available from a larger study (Block and Haan, 1971). These c o n sist of composite Q-sorts, based upon "case assemblies" of interview, observational, and test data gathered together separately for the two adolescent age periods and employing the 104-item adolescent version of the California Q-sort (Block, 1961). (.4, Q-sort requires the ordering of a large number of descriptive statements into a prescribed distribution along a dimension of being most to least characteristic of the target person.) The Q-sorts were done by welt-trained clinical professionals and, to assure independence between early and late adolescence assessments, the Q-sorts for the two periods were done by different judges for any given study participant. Each sort at each age period involved at least three judges; when initial agreement among the three fell below acceptable limits, the least consensual judge was dropped and additional judges were assigned. The three were then averaged and the reliability of these composites never fell below a Spearman-Brown corrected r of 0.65. Rather than working with the 208 Q-sort item scores thus available for each study participant (104 items each, at early and late adolescence) we decided to reduce the number of measures while conserving the reliable information they carried. The method chosen was Tryon's cluster analysis technique (Tryon and
personality Antecedents of Completed Family Size
315
Bailey, 1970), which yields the minimal number of oblique dimensions necessary to account for a maximum proportion of the reliable variance within a correlation matrix. (An original procedure was devised and carried out which demonstrated that it was appropriate to seek a single set of clusters to account for the Q-sort item intercorrelations, one which fit each of the 8 correlation matrices generated by the two sexes, the two age levels, and the OGS and GS cohorts.) Therefore, a single cluster analysis was performed upon the total pool of Q-sort data. The result was a set of 11 highly reliable clusters, each defined as the composite of a number of individual Q-sort items. These we named
responsible, nurturant, emotive, intellectually competent, sociable, decisive, self-insightful, somaticizes, eroticizes, physically attractive, and defensive. In addition, eight individual items of high reliability, but of insufficient commonality to join or form clusters, were retained as separate dimensions. These items are moralistic, fantasizes, guilty, aesthetically reactive, represses, poweroriented, behaves sex-appropriately, and involved with same sex. The final product of these several procedures is a single, common set of 19 dimensions which provides comprehensive descriptions of personality at early and late adolescence for boys and girls. This set of measures carries essentially all of the reliable information contained in the original Q-sorts and provides, in our opinion, the potentially most powerful data base from which we can predict family size. Family Size: Considerations and Definition We adopt a "psychological" conceptualization of family size for this study. Specifically, we have defined family size as the total number of children who lived with, and were reared by, the participant substantially throughout their childhood and adolescence and during the course of a single continuous marriage. Included, therefore, are biological offspring as well as any other children, informally or legally adopted, who were raised in the family. Because our latest information as to the number of the children in the home is at least as recent as age 40 and in the majority of cases is current (at a time when the participants are almost 50 years of age, at the youngest), we can safely assume that we are dealing with "f'mal" family size. Not included in the sample are participants who died before age 40, who never married, and who, though married, neither bore nor adopted any children. (Exclusion of these zero-child participants is due partly to their scarcity - 5 men and 6 women - and to the possibility that infertility was the overriding factor in this group.) It should be clear, then, that we are not dealing with adolescent antecedents of fertility, per se, although fertility (as usually defined) and family size (as we have defined it) are no doubt highly correlated. But we suspect that the magnitude of the association, while necessarily substantial, does not assure that
316
Livson and Day
the personality predictors reported here would remain invariant if the actual criterion were fertility. We make this point now only by way of focusing on our assumption that biological and psychological family sizes may be, for conceptual purposes, usefully discriminable constructs, especially in populations where adoption rates are relatively high. In such instances we suggest that early personality measures may show a different predictive pattern when the outcome is, on the one hand, the number of biological offspring and, on the other, an augmentation or substitution of such children by others whose entry onto the family scene characteristically requires somewhat more conscious and deliberate action. By this definition the women in our study have reared an average of 2.9 children; the men, 3.1. These values, slightly inflated by dropping out zero-child families, are clearly in line with national norms for these cohorts, both with respect to actual and preferred family size. The range is from I-8 children, but for our correlational analysis we have treated as equivalent families of 5 or more children.
RESULTS It may be useful to note here that our decision to cluster-analyze the Q-sort data was, in part, based upon the results of preliminary work. Specifically, univariate analyses of variance were carried out for each of the adolescent Q-sort items, separately for each sex and within the two adolescent age periods. Some "significant" relationships were found, but considering that 461 ANOVAS were computed, there were far too few to persuade us that chance levels had been surpassed. (Only a Monte Carlo technique could have generated true chance levels for each set ofintercorrelated variables against which to evaluate the significance of each set of results, and this was economically impractical.) Therefore, we resorted to the information-conserving reduction of the item pool to the much smaller (and more reliable) set of 19 personality dimensions. We report here only the product-moment correlations between these dimensions (separately for early and late adolescence) and family size. Thus, only bivariate and linear predictive relationships from personality to family size are under consideration in this report. We expect, in analyses currently under way, to complicate and enhance the predictive picture by evaluating both multivariate and curvilinear relationships, both within and across the two adolescent periods.
Family Size Prediction from Adolescent Personality: Men The harvest from the correlational analyses of the males' data is quite meager. Indeed, the items which reach conventional standards of statistical
Personality Antecedents of Completed Family Size
317
Table I. Correlations of Personality Dimensions with Family Size-Males a Early adolescence Personality dimension Responsible Nurturant Emotive Intellectual competence Sociable Decisive Self-insightful Somaticizes Eroticizes Physically attractive Defensive Moralistic Fantasizes Guilty Aesthetically reactive Represses Power-oriented Behaves sex-appropriately Involved with same sex
r 0.17 0.16 -0.08 0.16 -0.17 -0.02 0.20 b -0.17 -0.01 0.22 b -0.19 b -0.14 -0.24 c 0.26 c 0.10 -0.02 -0.11 0.08 -0.04
r (IQ)
r (SES)
0.17 0.16 -0.04 0.12 -0.15 -0.01 0.14 -0.14 0.01 0.20 b -0.19 b -0.17 -0.24 c 0.26 c 0.09 0.01 -0.11 0.09 -0.06
0.16 0.16 -0.11 0.10 -0.20 b -0.07 0.20 b -0.16 -0.01 0.22 b -0.16 -0.18 b -0.19 b 0.26 c -0.10 -0.02 -0.14 0.11 -0.01
Late adolescence r 0.18 b -0.02 -0.10 0.19 b -0.04 0.13 -0.08 -0.03 -0.08 0.21 b -0.07 0.18 b -0.06 0.19 b 0.07 0.10 0.15 -0.06 0.07
9 (IQ)
9 (SES)
0.10 -0.08 -0.05 0.12 -0.02 0.13 -0.16 -0.02 -0.04 0.18 h -0.03 0.14 -0.08 0.18 b 0.03 0.13 0.18 -0.09 0.12
0.18 -0.00 -0.14 0.13 -0.05 0.05 -0.08 -0.00 -0.09 0.25c -0.06 0.16 -0.05 0.21b 0.10 0.13 0.12 -0.07 0.03
aColumn r values are product-moment coefficients. Columns r(IQ) and r(SES)are the first-order partial correlations between the dimension and family size, controlling for adolescent IQ and adult socioeconomic status, respectively. bp
