ABSTRACT
Introduction
How does a student’s personality development relate to the personality of their classmates? The school class builds a pertinent comparison group during adolescence that has been identified as a critical factor in students’ development of abilities and self-perceptions. This study empirically tests the impact of classroom personality composition on changes in adolescents’ Big Five personality traits. We hypothesized positive associations between class-level openness and conscientiousness and the individual development of these traits given their role in academic performance.
Method
To test these hypotheses and explore additional composition effects, we employed three approaches of multilevel structural equation modeling on two large longitudinal samples of German adolescents (N
1 = 5470; N
2 = 788).
Results
Our analyses yielded two principal findings: First, individual personality levels remained highly stable across different time periods. Second, contrary to our hypotheses, baseline class-level openness and conscientiousness were not positively linked to individual personality development. Instead, there were some indications that higher class-level openness was negatively linked to individual openness to experiences at the second measurement point.
Conclusions
We discuss the absence of systematic composition effects at the classroom level and consider methodological challenges in investigating these effects.