A "little-five" lexically based perspective on personality disorder symptoms in adolescence

Recently, De Clercq and De Fruyt (2003) examined the relation between adaptive and maladaptive personality functioning in adolescence, using adult measures to describe adolescent personality and personality pathology, i.e., that is the NEO PI-R (Costa & McCrae, 1992) and the ADP-TV (Schotte & De Doncker, 1994) respectively. The present study extends this work, administering a lexically based and age-specific measure of adaptive personality, i.e., that is the Hierarchical Personality Inventory for Children (HiPIC; Mervielde & De Fruyt 1999), to 454 nonclinical adolescents. Results largely replicated across adult FFM versus lexically derived and age-specific measures, although HiPIC domains explained a larger proportion of disorder variance, with Benevolence and Conscientiousness especially demonstrating less descriptive specificity. Lexically derived facets were further helpful to achieve greater disorder-descriptive specificity. Finally, adolescent personality pathology, when operationalized using Axis 11 criteria, showed more overlap in adolescence than in adults. It is concluded that future studies should focus on agc-specific taxonomies and measures to assess personality pathology in adolescence.