Personality Measurement in Children: A Dimensional Approach
llnvesligalion supported by the Bethlern Royal Research Fund. Phrases like “exceptional children” and “special education,” when used in the psychological and educational literature, are usually applied to children scoring especially high or low on some scale which measures cognitive “ability” variables: temperament and character are usually passed by-possibly because of the well-known difficulties of measurement in this area. Another reason has probably been the psychiatric and medical overtones of “abnormality” in these areas; there is a deep-seated belief that an extreme placement in regard to some of the dimensions along which personality can be measured denotes some kind of “disease,” and it goes against the grain to suggest the presence of mental disorders in young children unless, as in the case of autistic children, there is no gainsaying such abnormality. In this paper, we shall be reviewing some recent efforts to study the personality of the child in its noncognitive aspects, and to test the applicability to children of some theories originally developed in relation to the adult personality. The main notion underlying our approach has been that of the personality continuum or dimension (Eysenck, 1947). Psychiatrists diagnose patients as though they were dealing with categorical concepts or disease entities: this is probably a relic of long-established medical ways of thinking not necessarily applicable to psychological variables and concepts. Malaria, scarlet fever, syphilis, and broken bones are rightly considered “categorical” disease entities, with special causes, specific sets of symptoms, and particular types of treatment. It is equally clear that anxiety state, hysteria, and schizophrenia are not “categorical” disease entities in this sense: