 13. Personality in Adolescence  305
most students are assumed to have attained 
school readiness, teachers distinguished a 
creative (openness) from a hard-  working 
child (conscientiousness). Mervielde et al. 
(1995) further showed that predictive validi -
ties of the personality scales for grades in -
creased throughout primary school.
Barbaranelli, Caprara, Rabasca, and Pas -
torelli (2003) revamped the adult version of 
their Big Five Questionnaire (BFQ; Caprara, 
Barbaranelli, Borgogni, & Perugini, 1993), 
including trait adjectives and short behavior -
al items applicable to describe children, into 
the Big Five Questionnaire—  Children ver -
sion (BFQ-C; Barbaranelli et al., 2003). They 
analyzed descriptions provided by multiple 
sources, including self-  reports and reports 
from parents and teachers, and showed that 
four of the Big Five could be retrieved across 
all informant types. In line with Mervielde 
et al. (1995), conscientiousness was a con -
sistent predictor of academic achievement. 
Externalizing problems, assessed with the 
Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL; Achen -
bach, 1991) correlated negatively with con -
scientiousness and emotional stability, and 
emotional stability was also negatively as -
sociated with internalizing problems. Fi -
nally, John, Caspi, Robins, Moffitt, and 
Stouthamer-  Loeber (1994) developed a set 
of markers for the FFM relying on Block 
and Block’s (1980) California Child Q -Set 
(CCQ). John et al. convincingly showed that 
Big Five scales could be constructed from 
the CCQ items, labeling these as the “Little 
Five” factors. They also identified two addi -
tional factors, namely, irritable distress  and 
positive activity,  which they tentatively in -
terpreted as (1) error factors due to spurious 
intercorrelations among small sets of items, 
(2) CCQ-  specific factors, through the over -
representation of specific content, (3) facets 
of broader domains (e.g., neuroticism and 
Extraversion, respectively), or (4) factors 
beyond the Big Five, specific for adolescent 
boys. John and colleagues further examined 
relationships with teacher-  reported school 
performance and IQ. Conscientiousness and 
0penness were almost equally correlated 
with performance in the areas of reading, 
writing, spelling and math, and only open -
ness was correlated with verbal and perfor -
mance IQ. They also examined CCQ FFM 
differences between boys with and without internalizing and externalizing problems, 
relying on teacher CBCL ratings. External -
izing boys were less agreeable, less consci -
entious and more extraverted than nonex -
ternalizing boys, paralleling findings on the 
same sample between those who reported 
delinquent acts versus those who did not 
report delinquency. Internalizing boys were 
more neurotic and less conscientious than 
their noninternalizing peers.
Bottom‑Up  Research
Additional evidence for the validity of the 
FFM in younger age groups came from a 
bottom-  up approach  toward personality 
description. During the mid-1990s, a group 
of developmental and personality psycholo -
gists teamed with temperament research -
ers (Kohnstamm, Halverson, Mervielde, & 
Havill, 1998) to examine the content and 
structure of parental free descriptions of 
children’s personality. They started to col -
lect personality descriptions of children ages 
3, 6, 9, or 12 years in multiple countries. in -
cluding Belgium, China, Germany, Greece, 
the Netherlands, Poland, and the United 
States. Researchers simply asked parents 
to describe what they found characteristic 
for their child, and recorded and later tran -
scribed verbatim their answers. All person -
ality descriptive utterances were classified in 
a lexical database, structured in terms of the 
Big Five and major temperament model cate -
gories. This database, representing the active 
personality descriptive language of parents, 
formed the starting point for the develop -
ment of two inventories to assess personal -
ity of children: the Hierarchical Personality 
Inventory for Children (HiPIC; Mervielde 
& De Fruyt, 1999; Mervielde, De Fruyt, & 
De Clercq, 2009), constructed in the Belgian 
(Flemish) language domain, and the Inven -
tory for Children’s Individual Differences 
(ICID; Halverson et al., 2003), representing 
the personality descriptive language pro -
vided by American parents. In contrast with 
previous top-down approaches that slightly 
amended items so these became useful for 
children and adolescents, the current ap -
proach started bottom-  up, without any a 
priori model, and tried to find the best rep -
resentation of the content enclosed in what 
parents found characteristic of their chil -