Adolescent personality antecedents of completed family size: A longitudinal study

Comprehensive personality assessments, made independently for early and late adolescence, were employed to predict the subsequent family sizes of 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 highly significantpositive correlations demonstrated withintellectual competence of 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 hold for current and future generations of women.