The Big Five Personality Theory and Gender Identity

According to American Psychological Association (2000), personality refers to individual differences in characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving. The study of personality focuses on two broad areas: One is understanding individual differences in particular personality characteristics, such as sociability or irritability. The other is understanding how the various parts of a person come together as a whole. A number of different theories have emerged to explain different aspects of personality. Some theories focus on explaining how personality develops while others are concerned with individual differences in personality. The following are just a few of the major theories of personality proposed by different psychologists: Behavioral Theories, Psychoanalytic Theories. This paper focus on the Big Five personality dimensions to explain childhood personality development.
Big Five Personality theory described the personality in childhood and later in life as a set of variations across five primary dimensions identified by researchers: extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness/intellect. Each bipolar factor (e.g., Extraversion vs. Introversion) summarizes several more specific facets (e.g., Sociability), which, in turn, subsume a large number of even more specific traits (e.g., talkative, outgoing) (Gosling, Rentfrow and Swann Jr, 2003). These basic factors can explain and predict individual differences over a wide range of settings, including mental health, job satisfaction, and work performance (van der Linden, te Nijenhuis and Bakker, 2010). Extraversion is the dimension of how you operate in the crowd and what energize you. Agreeableness is the extent to which the tendency to agree with others or being cooperative. Conscientiousness refers to the ability to control your impulse on certain area and how much focus and commitment you are going to put in. Neuroticism is the dimension of emotional (in)stability, about how stable your emotion are and how you react to stressful events. Openness is associated with the degree of openness to experiences.
The present investigation sought to validate the single general factor hypothesis more thoroughly in different empirical contexts varying the age of participants (adults versus adolescents) and the methods using for the measurement of the Big Five-factors Several rating instruments have been developed such as NEO Personality Inventory, FIPI and TIPI. Then can talk about valifity including stability and predictors. There is strong evidence that the Big Five are not orthogonal, and the correlations between the Big Five increase to substantial levels if oblique solutions were used in factor-analytic procedures (Musek, 2007). There is research to show the relationship between personality and performance in a team. On top of that, it the validity study indicated that the GFP has a substantive component as it is related to supervisor-rated job performance (Musek, 2007). A study had been done to explore the relationship between conscientiousness, attention, and information acquisition. Highly conscientiousness individuals significantly outscored low-conscientiousness individuals on both attention and information acquisition. The results of this study suggest disparate facets of conscientiousness are related to attention and information acquisition. Conscientiousness is a primary factor in the Five-Factor Model of Personality. High conscientiousness have been used to describe individuals who display such characteristics as being purposeful, strong-willed, determined, careful, future-oriented, and motivated to accomplish goals, whereas low conscientiousness has been used to describe individuals with such characteristics as being lackadaisical, unreliable, and hedonistic (Kelly, 2001). The propensity of a person to building interpersonal interactions with other without destructive interpersonal conflict is a function of personality (Kichuk and Wiesner, 1997). In order to maximum the chances of getting the best possible team performance, it is first necessary to determine the characteristics of personality of team members. This study attempts to etch a starting place for future selection of product design teams. Several researchers have suggested that team member personalities may be useful as a predictive device for future performance. This will also provide a guide for manager in hiring people. Factor of Neuroticism provided incremental validity over that provided by ability in differentiating successful from unsuccessful teams which provided partial support for the contention that personality might have value as an incremental predictor of team performance over established measures such as general cognitive ability. The results from this study are also somewhat supportive of the proposition from some early studies in the small group literature that a high level of Neuroticism is associated with poor performance (Kichuk & Wiesner, 1997). Research shown that child’s emerging sense of self has been strongly influenced by a combination of cultural context such as family environment and school environment. Over the elementary school years, the development of children’s self-concept gradually shifts toward a more abstract, more comparative, more generalized self-definition. Gender identity has been defined as a person’s basic sense of self with regard to “maleness” and “femaleness”. Gender role has been defined in various ways; for example, it has included a person’s preference for, or adoption of, behavioral characteristics or endorsement of personality traits that are linked to cultural notions of masculinity and femininity. In childhood, gender role has been commonly indexed and operationalized with regard to several parameters, including peer preferences, toy interests, roles in fantasy play, dress-up play, and so on. The extent to which a child identifies with, or feels closer to, the parent of the same or the other sex may also be an indicator of gender identity and gender role identification (Zucker et al., 2006). Research suggests that the ability of self-categorization is linked to cognitive development. Studies of children show that stereotyped ideas about sex roles develop early, even in the environment which promotes gender equality. Theorists from most of the major traditions have tried their hand at explaining the formation of gender identity. Research shown that the availability of stereotypical sex-roles models in the various media cause an impact on shaping children’s sex role behavior and attitudes. As in the children exposed to sex-roles stereotypes and make use of it in their real life such as modeling. Additionally, the parenting style did influence the children’s understanding on gender roles. Parents may also play a role of transmitting information about gender roles and reinforcing sex typing. For example, parents reinforce sex-typed activities in children, not only buying different of toys for boys and girls. Research stated that parents tend to respond more positively when their children’s behaviors is typical expected and represent of their gender roles such as girls play with dolls and boys play with trucks. Moreover, once they reached elementary school, they are provided more opportunities to practice the stereotypical beliefs. In that sense, they might learn gender labels and show same-sex playmate choices in school. For example, as a boys, engaging in the stereotypically male athletic activities.
In conclusion, we acknowledged that Big Five Personality Theory provided detailed description of personality development and the predictive of the personality future direction. From the literature review, we know that formation of gender identity is the result of nature and nurture.

References
Gosling, S., Rentfrow, P. and Swann Jr, W. (2003). A very brief measure of the Big-Five personality domains. Journal of Research in personality, 37(6), pp.504--528.
Kelly, W. (2001). Personality and time on task: The role of conscientiousness in attention and information acquisition. Educational Research Quarterly, 25(2), pp.15--21.
Kichuk, S. and Wiesner, W. (1997). The big five personality factors and team performance: implications for selecting successful product design teams. Journal of Engineering and Technology Management, 14(3), pp.195--221. van der Linden, D., te Nijenhuis, J. and Bakker, A. (2010). The general factor of personality: A meta-analysis of Big Five intercorrelations and a criterion-related validity study. Journal of Research in Personality, 44(3), pp.315--327.
Zucker, K.J (1999). Intersexuality and gender identity differentiation. Annual Review of Sex Research, 10(1), pp.1—69.
Zucker, K., Mitchell, J., Bradley, S., Tkachuk, J., Cantor, J. and Allin, S. (2006). The recalled childhood gender identity/gender role questionnaire: Psychometric properties. Sex Roles, 54(7-8), pp.469--483.
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