and sensitivity of a trained interviewer. She or he would cut through the
facade of well-being and see the crisis brewing just beneath the surface,ready to explode at any time into depression, suicide, divorce, alcohol -
ism, dramatic career shifts.”
Perhaps. Levinson’s interviewers seem to have seen these things.
But Farrell and Rosenberg (1981) also conducted interviews with 20 ofthe men they had surveyed, and they came to quite different conclu -
sions. Many men had difficulties in life, but there was no evidence that
problems were concentrated at certain periods. Further, the life histo -
ries these interviewers compiled from several hours of talking with the
men and their wives and children convinced them that, for the minoritywho appeared to have a crisis, “the difficulties they experience havetheir roots in conflicts and problems of earlier origin” and are likely tolead to a “more general process of depressive decline” (p. 215). By con -
trast, they said of one man who showed Openness and positive adapta-
tion in the middle years that “the sense of self he experiences at midlifeis not a marked change from that of early adulthood.” In search of amidlife crisis, these researchers emerged from intensive interviews withan impression of stability in the life course.
***
The interview , it seems, provides more ambiguous accounts of the pe-
riod of adulthood than do standard personality tests. Some interviewerscome to the conclusion that development proceeds in stages; some seeno stages at all. There is even greater disparity when the stability of ob -
jective test results is contrasted with the growth and development de -
scribed by interviewers. In part, this disparity results from the flexibility
of the interview as a method of gathering data: If it is more sensitive tothe subtle thoughts and feelings of the subject, it is also more sensitiveto the biases and preconceptions of the interviewer. In part, however, italso results from the fact that interviews are typically filled with con -
crete details from the individual’s life, not generalizations about disposi -
tions. Lives surely change, perhaps in stages; personality traits, by and
large, do not.
We see little reason to adopt the model of development proposed
by Levinson and his colleagues, or the more widely held theory of amidlife crisis, and we are skeptical that the processes described by182 PERSONALITY IN ADULTHOOD