coincidence, or did it mean that personality development was a univer -
sal pattern?
We immediately turned to the psychological literature to see if we
could confirm this hypothesis. Ideally , we would have liked to find lon -
gitudinal studies tracing personality traits from adolescence into adult -
hood. But we soon discovered that there was no literature to consult.
There had only been a handful of longitudinal studies conductedoutside the United States (e.g., Thomae, 1976); few of them had usedstandardized personality tests, and none of them had used measures ofthe FFM. More surprising was that there were also few cross-sectionalstudies. Although personality scales have been used around the world atleast since the 1970s (Cattell, 1973), it appeared that no one hadthought to use them to assess adult age differences.
Fortunately for us, we had colleagues in other countries who had
also collected data from students and adults. In our first article on thetopic, we analyzed data from South Korea, Italy , Germany , Croatia, andPortugal (McCrae et al., 1999). In each culture, we divided the respon-dents into four groups: age 18–21, 22–29, 30–49, and 50+. Figure 4Cross-Cultural Views of Personality and Aging 91
FIGURE 4. Openness to Experience for four age groups in five cultures; none of
the Croatian respondents was aged 22–29. Adapted from McCrae et al. (1999).