young people the self-concept should still be quite accurate, a good re -
flection of what the person is really like. Consequently there should be
good agreement between self-reports and spouse ratings among youngcouples. But if personality changes with age while the self-concept isfrozen, self-reports will give increasingly inaccurate pictures of person -
ality . Correspondingly , the agreement between self-reports and spouse
ratings will become poorer and poorer. Among older couples there maybe no agreement at all.
These would be the consequences if personality changed while the
self-concept did not. When we examined the correlations between selfand spouse for young, middle-aged, and elderly couples, however, wefound no decrease in agreement with age. (In fact, the only significantdifference was that there was more agreement—not less—about Extra -
version in older men.) This finding provides some powerful evidence
that personality does not change and that crystallization of the self-conceptcannot itself account for the correlations seen in studies of self-reportinventories.
There are other pieces of evidence as well. Jack Block (1971, 1981)
has reported on a remarkable series of longitudinal studies conducted inBerkeley . Personality records have been kept on about 200 boys andgirls over a period now approaching 50 years. These records include testscores, teachers’ notes, biographical sketches, and many other docu-ments. For each of four time periods (junior high school, senior highschool, the 30s, and the 40s) independent judges reviewed these re-cords and rated the subjects on the California Q-Set (CQS), which, aswe have seen, measures aspects of all five domains of personality . Differ -
ent judges were used for each time period, and yet, when individuals
were compared across time, remarkable evidence of stability in person -
ality was found.
In another study on the parents of these subjects, judges provided
ratings across an interval of 40 years, from ages 30–70 (Mussen,Eichhorn, Honzik, Bieber, & Meredith, 1980). Again, despite the differ -
ences in judges and the unreliability of single-item scales, most of the
ratings showed significant correlation across time.
For the domains of N, E, and O we have 6-year longitudinal spouse
ratings for 167 subjects. Table 14 gives stability coefficients for men andwomen separately and combined; all these correlations are significantand quite comparable in magnitude to those found in studies of self-reports. Husbands’ and wives’ views of their spouses’ personalities con -Qualifications and Rival Hypotheses 121