Contextualizing personality: Personality within and across social roles and conceptual levels

Personality psychologists have begun to consider the predictive ability of comparable personality characteristics at the levels of traits, goals, and narrative identity. Here, we build upon and extend this work by adopting a contextualized personality approach. Doing so entailed exploring the implications of personality characteristics within three social roles and at each level of personality in relation to role-specific and generalized measures of psychological adjustment.

Undergraduates (N = 155) rated traits and specified goals and narratives pertaining to their roles as friends, students, and sons/daughters. Measures of trait-based, goal-based, and narrative-based approach orientation were subsequently derived.

Within personality levels, mean-levels of approach orientation differed significantly across social roles. Goal-based and narrative-based approach orientation showed inconsistent associations with role-specific psychological adjustment. When approach orientation was aggregated across roles, however, it demonstrated positive relations with adjustment at each personality level.

There exists contextual variability among and between personality characteristics and adjustment. In addition, in certain cases, aggregating across contextualized personality measures (within conceptual levels) may provide a more reliable indicator of the underlying psychological construct. These results contribute to an evolving understanding of personality coherence and the relation between personality characteristics and context.