We examined relations between US early adolescents’ major personality traits and global life satisfaction (LS) and satisfaction in five specific domains (i.e., family, friends, school, self, living environment). A sample of 344 7th graders completed the Adolescent Personal Style Inventory (Lounsbury et al., 2003), which assesses the Big Five traits of neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. Furthermore, participants completed the Students’ Life Satisfaction Scale (Huebner, 1991) and the Multidimensional Students’ Life Satisfaction Scale (Huebner, Zullig, & Saha, 2012), assessing global and domain-specific satisfaction, respectively. Neuroticism (inversely), and conscientiousness, agreeableness, and extraversion (positively) were uniquely associated with early adolescents’ global LS, with neuroticism showing the strongest association. With respect to domain-specific satisfaction, neuroticism (inversely) and conscientiousness (positively) were uniquely related to satisfaction in all five domains. Extraversion displayed the strongest, unique (positive) association with friend and self-satisfaction reports. Openness displayed the strongest, unique (positive) association with school satisfaction. Agreeableness demonstrated a unique (positive) association with family satisfaction. The results demonstrated the importance of neuroticism in understanding early adolescents’ global LS, while the personality variables revealed varying patterns of relationships with domain-specific satisfaction reports.
We focused on the relations between early adolescents’ major personality traits and their reports of global life satisfaction (LS) and domain-specific LS in this study. Global LS reports reflect a cognitive evaluation of the quality of one’s life ( Diener, Emmons, Larsen, & Griffin, 1985) whereas domain-specific LS reports reflect cognitive evaluations of the quality of specific, major life domains, such as school, family, and self. Such evaluations are based on comparisons of individuals’ circumstances with standards set by the individual (e.g., Diener et al., 1985). Focusing on both global and domain-specific satisfaction has been considered useful when examining indicators of subjective well-being (e.g., Huebner, 1994). While measures of global LS utilize items that are domain-free (e.g., “I have a good life”), measures of domain-specific satisfaction utilize domain-specific items (e.g., “I have a good family life”) (e.g., Huebner, 1991 and Huebner, 1994) to provide more comprehensive portraits of well-being.
The importance of both global and domain-specific reports of LS is demonstrated by the fact that although scores on key domains are correlated, they are distinguishable in children as young as age 8 (Huebner, 1994). Individuals can report high satisfaction in one area and low in another. Persons’ scores on the domains also show differing patterns of correlations with variables. For example, Antaramian, Huebner, and Valois (2008) observed that adolescents’ satisfaction with family life (but not global LS) was significantly associated with an intact (vs. non-intact) family structure. For another example, satisfaction with school experiences appeared to be most strongly associated with good teacher–student relationships (Jiang, Huebner, & Siddall, 2013) whereas overall LS appeared to be most strongly associated with good family-student relationships (Siddall, Huebner, & Jiang, 2013). Thus, the exploration of the relations between personality traits and domain-specific LS reports promises to yield more nuanced information about the goodness of fit between various personality traits and early adolescents’ experiences of subjective well-being in specific life domains.
Within the present study, we focused on the Big Five approach to personality as it has received widespread acceptance as a comprehensive model describing a set of five broad, cross-culturally relevant personality traits (i.e., neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness) (Digman, 1990). This set of five personality factors has also been validated among young people (e.g., Goldberg, 2001 and Lounsbury et al., 2003).
There has been noteworthy research attention paid to the relations between personality traits and global LS in adults (e.g., DeNeve & Cooper, 1998), with less attention paid to youth (e.g., Proctor, Linley, & Maltby, 2009). The traits of neuroticism (inversely) and, to a lesser degree, extraversion (positively), have consistently been shown to be related to global LS of adults (for a review, see DeNeve & Cooper, 1998). Furthermore, adults’ levels of agreeableness and conscientiousness appeared to be positively associated with global LS (e.g., McCrae & Costa, 1991). Regarding youth, the traits of neuroticism (inversely) and extraversion (positively) have also consistently been shown to relate to global LS (e.g., Fogle et al., 2002, Garcia, 2011, Heaven, 1989 and Weber et al., 2013). A recent study also revealed that in addition to neuroticism and extraversion, the remaining Big Five traits were significantly positively correlated to youth global LS (Suldo, Minch, & Hearon, in press).
Given the relative lack of research with youth, more studies are needed to clarify the personality correlates of their LS. Furthermore, prior research with youth samples has mostly studied the relations between two or three of the Big Five personality traits (e.g., neuroticism, extraversion), and also has been restricted to measures of global LS. Hence, little is known about the relations between major personality traits of youth (especially in terms of the Big Five) and their satisfaction in differing life domains.
Such knowledge of personality-based predictors of LS (global and domain-specific) among youth appears to be important, as LS is not an epiphenomenon but rather appears to play a causal role with respect to a variety of important outcomes, such as peer victimization, disengagement from schooling, decreased parental support, and increased internalizing and externalizing behaviors (see Huebner, Hills, Siddall, & Gilman, 2014, for a review). Therefore, it seems helpful to identify the full range of determinants of such cognitive evaluations related to life as a whole and with specific life domains.
