An interview
We talked with Naemi Brandt about her recently published paper titled, “What teachers and parents can add to personality ratings of children: Unique associations with academic performance in elementary school”, which is already available as OnlineFirst and will be published in an upcoming issue of EJP. Naemi is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Hamburg, Germany.
Read on to learn more about Naemi’s work on parent and teacher ratings of children’s personality!
Q: Hi there Naemi! Can you tell us a bit about who you are and what made you become interested in studying personality psychology?
Currently I’m working as a post-doc at the University of Hamburg, at Jenny Wagner’s very inspiring lab. My research mainly focuses on understanding the role of personality characteristics and their development in educational and occupational success. The main question of my research is why equally smart students differ in how successful they are in school. Besides looking at personality as antecedents of success, I’m very interested in how schooling affects the developmental trajectories of personality characteristics. That is, whether students become more curious about the world and learn to internalize work habits that are beneficial for their further educational pathways. In doing so, I consider personality from different perspectives, in different contexts, and at different abstraction levels. For example, I focus on traits, facets, and characteristics.
My interest in personality research was spurred during my time as a student assistant at Matthias Ziegler’s lab at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin during my master’s program. During that time, I learned a lot about the structure of personality and the issues that come with measuring it. After my studies, I started my PhD at the DIPF | Leibniz Institute for Research and Information in Education, which is an institute for education-related research. At the research group of Michael Becker, I began to think more deeply about the consequences of personality for educational outcomes and success. This institute is highly interdisciplinary and this kind of structure inspired me to broaden my thinking as a personality psychologist with the views of educational scientists and sociologists.
Q: What aspects of your work do you find most enjoyable?
I think there are many things that I’m really excited about, but for me the most important aspect is the freedom to follow my own ideas and interests. I think this independence is a great privilege and honor, and I think few other professions offer this opportunity in the same way. Although this freedom comes with great challenges, for example, to find out what is of most relevance, what is the best way to assess that topic and whether it is testable at all, and what new knowledge I have to acquire first, it never ceases to amaze me to learn all these new things every day.
What I really love about personality research or researchers in particular is that they embrace the diversity of human beings, focusing particularly on the uniqueness of people and its antecedents and consequences. At the same time, I perceive that personality researchers have great enthusiasm for research methods and diagnostics, and tackle their interesting questions in a very sophisticated and creative manner.
Q: What do you like to do outside of work?
I really like to go for a run or attend an online yoga class, because after all that sitting and thinking I need to recharge my batteries by releasing my physical energy. With the current pandemic situation, I’m very happy that those activities are still possible. Normally I also enjoy spending time with my friends and family, just drinking coffee, going for long walks, and chatting. Another thing I love to do is to read, particularly books with historical reference. For example, at the moment I’m reading a book about Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s. It’s a very interesting and exciting book series by Volker Kutcher that I really enjoy and can recommend!
Q: Can you tell us about your study?
In our study, we investigated the role of personality in educational performance in elementary school. The main focus of the study was the consideration of different rater perspectives when it comes to children’s personality. I think it’s important to say that we did not look at who has the most valid or the most accurate perspective on students’ personality. Rather, we were interested in understanding the ways in which teacher and parent ratings of children’s personality can add to children’s self-reports when studying associations with academic performance (as measured as grades and standardized test scores). That is, we looked at teacher and parent ratings and took their judgments to see whether they overlapped with children’s self-reports and, importantly, whether they did not overlap. We wanted to know whether the unique aspects that teachers or parents see, have some value for explaining academic performance. This is incremental to the perspective of self-reports, because we control for the overlap with children’s self-reports.
We know from previous research that raters differ in terms of motivation and situational information. Teachers experience students in different situations compared to parents, which can lead to different personality judgments of course. Given these context-specific differences to gather information on personality judgment, we expected that different raters complement self-reports in certain situations and for specific traits. For example, teachers have a unique view on students’ performance-related personality traits, because the school environment particularly triggers the expression of performance-related traits such as conscientiousness and openness following the Trait-Activation Theory. Therefore, we hypothesized incremental associations of teacher reported personality on academic performance. This incremental effect was expected both with respect to grades and standardized test scores.
To test this question, we performed particularly rigorous tests by separating shared and unique perspectives between observer- and self-ratings in a sample of 1,411 elementary school students. All the groups of informants – that is, teachers, parents, and children – rated children’s personality with the same inventory. We applied so-called bifactor-(S–1) models to estimate shared and unique perspectives on children’s personality. These models allowed us to systematically disentangle the degree to which teacher and parent perspectives uniquely relate to children’s academic performance in two different subjects: German (native language) and mathematics.
As expected, the unique parts of teacher ratings of children’s conscientiousness and openness had the strongest associations with academic performance in German and mathematics. Regarding extraversion, neither parents nor teachers could uniquely contribute to the association of self-reported personality with performance. However, unique teacher ratings of children’s agreeableness could add to the associations with academic performance in German, whereas parents’ unique perspective on neuroticism showed incremental associations with performance above what children reported.
Putting it together, our study emphasizes that adult reports should not generally be favored over self-reports, but that specific raters can add value in predicting academic performance over and above self-reports. This was particularly the case for teacher ratings with respect to conscientiousness and openness and for parent ratings with regard to neuroticism. Along these lines, researchers should be aware of the fact that contextual dependencies need to be taken into account when selecting judges of personality, as information gathered in these contexts has differential relevance for certain outcomes. Finally, our findings also highlight the relevance of children’s own perspectives on their personality for associations with performance, even in elementary school.
In the future, I would really like to reanalyze this research question on another abstraction level. To gather more information about why these differential associations occur, it would be valuable to focus on the facet-level and to see what kind of facets teachers see or judge in their specific context. We may expect that some aspects of for example conscientiousness are more visible in the private context (e.g., orderliness) and some more in the school context (e.g., achievement striving, self-discipline). It would be interesting to see what different results occur when we let teachers, parents, and children rate facets of personality.
Q: Do you have any tips or advice for young researchers?
This is a tough question! I think that perhaps two things sometimes get lost when doing research.
The first thing is to remember that you are not alone. Talk to other people, ask for their opinion, discuss all the topics that come to your mind. It helped me a lot to have a great network of enthusiastic researchers at different career stages, who know the challenges and demands of the profession. They can broaden your view, offer support, or just tell you whom to ask when you have a question. For me, the biggest lesson I have learned is still to just ask for advice. I am glad my boss Jenny always encourages me to ask and not to always think that you have to solve everything on your own.
The second thing is that you have to be kind to yourself. Doing research requires a lot of patience and persistence. Sometimes things just don’t work out as expected and you have to deal with setbacks. Don’t be too hard on yourself, to err is human. I think in an ideal world, we would be willing to embrace our mistakes as new learning opportunities.