Personality organizations of well-functioning younger people and older adults

Person clustering of Q sort items for two longitudinal samples, studied at four periods from adolescence to middle adulthood, were generated for the sexes separately. After correlations between the resulting sixty-eight clusters showed that common personality organizations existed across time, sex, and samples, a second order clustering of the first sixty-eight was done which reduced the number of clusters to four. The first cluster represented a well-functioning organization, and comparisons were made of its hierarchial ordering of attributes between the longitudinal samples and a geriatric sample. Although both groups were dependable and productive, they diverged in the importance of intimate interpersonal relations and in their self concepts. The older people were more tender and intimate, but conserving of their own integrity, while the younger groups were more assertive and cognitively invested, as they must be to deal with their different life situations.