An interview
We recently talked with Ville-Juhani Ilmarinen, whose article titled, “Peer Sociometric Status and Personality Development from Middle Childhood to Preadolescence”, recently appeared in the September/October issue of EJP. Ville currently works as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki.
Read on to learn more about his work on sociometric status and personality development!
Photo taken by Markku Verkasalo.
Q: Hello Ville! Can you tell us a bit about yourself and your professional and personal interests?
I am a postdoctoral researcher in the Swedish School of Social Science at the University of Helsinki. I am working in a project funded by the Academy of Finland, which is led by Professor Jan-Erik Lönnqvist. The project aims to investigate how internal and external influences on our lives, such as, on the one hand, personality traits and personal values, and, on the other hand, the social interactions and social roles that we are embedded in, come to shape each other over the life-span. My main interests in psychology could be broadly described as individual differences and statistical methodologies. I’m interested in such things as individual differences in personality, cognitive ability, values, political attitudes, and femininity-masculinity. I also have some kind of obsession with finding the best (or the least poor) statistical approach for testing hypotheses or research questions, and am trying to expand my statistical toolkit all the time. To clarify, I don’t mean that I aim to find paths in the garden that lead to the most desirable results, but to finding out approaches that are able to deal with the set of assumptions that lurk between the hypothesis and data.
My personal life pretty much evolves around my family. I have two small kids who practically define my daily activities outside of work. Me and my partner are both on a 50% childcare leave, taking care of the kids on separate days during the week while the other parent is working. Family life is definitely something that I prioritize highly and I am very glad that it has been possible for me to have leaves to spend time with the kids and to learn proper parenting and taking responsibility. Besides family and work, I also try to play football semi-regularly.
Q: Can you tell us what this study is about?
The study is about the development of sociometric status and Big Five personality traits from age 7 to 13. We had multi-method data where personality was measured from three different viewpoints (self, parents and teachers), and sociometric status which was measured by peer nominations. The findings replicated the relevance of extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism for associations with sociometric status among peers. With the longitudinal design, it was possible to examine the cross-lagged associations between personality and peer status, i.e. whether personality predicts status and/or vice versa. We found that agreeableness and neuroticism (negatively and somewhat more inconsistently than agreeableness) predicted sociometric status, but also that extraversion did not predict sociometric status. Instead, prospective levels of extraversion were predicted by sociometric status.
As an addition to testing the linear longitudinal associations, we tested if temporal stability in sociometric status (i.e. how much an individual status temporally fluctuates between two time points) is associated with more temporally stable personality. We found such a pattern between status and extraversion. That is, we found that the more stable the status among peers was, the more stable an individual’s extraversion was. In addition, initial status also linearly predicted later stability in extraversion. Thus, early attainment of status among peers was associated with higher and more stable levels of extraversion. The results also held well across different types of personality reports and their combinations.
We interpreted these findings as indicating that status attainment and maintenance during the elementary school years can influence introversion-extraversion. For example, we suggest a possibility that there is a zero-sum component to individual differences in extraversion during the school years by which individual differences are partially allocated by the peer system in the classroom. Because there is a degree of hierarchy in the peer system, not everyone is able to behave in ways that are considered extraverted (taking initiative, being talkative, cracking jokes, etc.). If you are well regarded by peers and are also able to maintain this position, your behaviors are likely to be less constrained and generally more extraverted. But if you are not well liked, are not able to maintain your sociometric status, or you don’t value having high sociometric status, your behaviors are likely to be more constrained by the environment and therefore less extraverted. For lower status individuals, some extraverted behaviors could even lead to some sort of social punishments in the group. Previous findings for self-esteem and shyness also support these interpretations, as well as the observation that population variance in extraversion does not increase by age, at least not as clearly as for other Big Five traits.
Q: How did you come up with this study?
In my doctoral dissertation, I focused on the cross-sectional association between extraversion and sociometric status, and the longitudinal examinations in the present study were kind of a logical extension to that. There was a gap in the literature for this specific developmental stage, Big Five traits, and multi-method approach. Furthermore, I thought that the different viewpoints of various personality informants could be examined in combination (as a compressed measure of each trait) and separately to gain a better understanding of how well these associations hold across informants and operationalizations.
Q: What's next? In terms of this line of research but also more generally.
My view of personality has changed quite a lot during recent years – especially about the broad traits and what they represent. The evidence that broad traits such as each of Big Five or even their facets do not have a common cause is quite compelling, and I think the ideas about personality need to be adjusted accordingly. But at the same time, we have these broad factors that quite consistently (but far from perfectly consistently) emerge when dimensional reduction methods are applied to a set of narrower traits. In other words, it is unclear to me why certain sets of narrow traits tend to consistently come together and form a correlation pattern that can be partially reduced to some broad factor. Relating to this study on longitudinal associations between extraversion and sociometric status, I am currently considering whether the peer system experienced during the school years can partially explain the structure of extraversion. That is, if the peer system influences why assertiveness, activity, gregariousness, and positive emotionality and other narrower traits belonging to the extraversion domain become correlated. On other fronts, I am interested in the gender diagnosticity measurement approach to femininity-masculinity, by which between-sex differences in psychological characteristics are used to measure femininity-masculinity as an individual difference. It makes use cross-validation between different data where coefficients weights for a set of predictors (e.g., many personality traits) are obtained from one dataset and then used in another to calculate how female-like or male-like individuals are. This approach is obviously not limited to the personality domain but can be similarly used for any individual difference variables. For example, we quite recently found that among Finnish political elite, there are remarkable differences between political parties in femininity-masculinity that was calculated by this method from political attitudes (also while accounting for differences in parties’ sex-ratios; pre-print here). Polarization in political attitudes is also something that I have been recently more interested in. We are, for example, trying to seek out the circumstances under which immigration and environment attitudes become associated with each other (i.e. issue alignment polarization). It seems that this type of polarization is more prevalent among some political parties, at least in Finland (post-print here).
Q: Do you have any tips or advice for young scholars?
I only have short experience in the field, but at least having kids while doing a PhD or postdoc is something that I have first-hand experience in. I advocate anyone, especially men, to take long-term leaves if your employer allows it (and the government supports it, independently of the sex of the parent). It is most likely the only possible opportunity to experience what full-time parenting is. Also, if you are a working parent with a lot of family responsibilities, you are likely to soon realize that your time at work is very limited. For me, it was necessary to focus on fewer tasks and say “no” a lot, especially to myself. The forced prioritizing of work stuff has been a good thing. The time at work, although it is less than it was previously, has become more productive per time unit, although I am still very far from making the best use of it.
With regards to skills at work, I would also suggest to maximize the transparency and open science practices in your work. I also recommend learning R and/or other programming languages as early as possible. Although it can be time consuming at first, these skills likely pay themselves back in the years to come. I also suggest reading widely from other fields, and avoiding reading empirical studies with insufficient statistical power.