Adolescent conscientiousness predicts lower lifetime unemployment.

Abstract

Existing research on Big Five personality and unemployment has relied on personality measures elicited after the respondents had already spent years in the labor market, an experience which could change personality. We clarify the direction of influence by using the British Cohort Study (N = 4,206) to examine whether conscientiousness and other Big Five personality traits at age 16-17 predict unemployment over age 16-42. Our hypothesis that higher conscientiousness in adolescence would predict lower unemployment was supported.In analyses controlling for intelligence, gender, and parental socioeconomic status, the less conscientious (-1SD) had a predicted probability of unemployment twice as high (3.4% vs 1.7%) as the highly conscientious (+1SD), an effect size comparable to intelligence.Mediation analysis revealed that academic motivation and educational attainment explained only 8.9% of this association. Fostering conscientiousness in early-life may be an effective way to reduce unemployment throughout adulthood.

Nice guys finish last: When and why agreeableness is associated with economic hardship.

“…Participants rated the three items "I am friendly", "I am helpful", and "I am obedient" on a scale of 1 (Does not apply), 2 (Applies somewhat), and 3 (Applies very much). Previous work has demonstrated the validity of this measure (Egan, Daly, Delaney, Boyce, & Wood, 2017) by showing that it correlates highly (r = 0.70) with the standard 50-item version of the International Personality Item Pool (IPIP; Goldberg, 1999). With a Cronbach's alpha of 0.45, the scale reliability for our sample was poor, however, comparable to other short measures of agreeableness such as the BFI-10 (Rammstedt & John, 2007) or the TIPI (Gosling et al, 2003).…”

How do Personality and Social Structures Interact with Each other to Predict Important Life Outcomes? The Importance of Accounting for Personality Change

“…For example, an individual, although employed at the time of the personality measurement, may have experienced unemployment previously, and thus, this raises some concerns as to whether there is a true personality measure that is not confounded. Whilst some researchers have used childhood or adolescent personality to predict future life outcomes (e.g., Daly et al, ; Egan et al, in press), we were only able to define pre‐event personality via the earliest measure in our dataset. Thus, the empirical analysis is hampered by whether our pre‐event measures can truly be considered pre‐event (see Luhmann et al, , for a related discussion).…”

“…The availability of personality scales in large nationally representative longitudinal datasets has created many new research possibilities for understanding how personality relates to important life outcomes. Researchers are now able to better understand, for example, how early life personality characteristics relate to later life events (Daly, Delaney, Egan, & Baumeister, ; Egan, Daly, Delaney, Boyce, & Wood, in press), how personality develops in response to social conditions (Boyce, Wood, Daly, & Sedikides, ; Specht, Egloff, & Schmukle, ), the extent to which effects found in small studies generalize at the population level (Donnellan & Lucas, ), how personality develops over the life course (Lucas & Donnellan, ), and how personality predicts well‐being response following important life events (Boyce & Wood, ; Boyce, Wood, & Brown, ; Pai & Carr, ). Further, the appearance of personality scales in large longitudinal datasets, which are more commonly used outside of psychology, has helped introduce personality research to disciplines that have traditionally focused more on social determinants of life outcomes.…”

“…However, there are other studies that use large nationally representative longitudinal datasets to ask similar questions that have been explicit about their assumptions regarding personality change (e.g., Boyce & Wood, , ; Boyce et al, ; Boyce, Wood, & Ferguson, , ; Daly et al, ; Egan et al, in press; Kesavayuth, Rosenman, & Zikos, ; Pai & Carr, ). Such studies have ensured that personality is at least measured prior to the outcome in which they are interested.…”

Divorced and Unemployed: the Declining Association between Two Critical Lifecourse States in the UK, 1984-2017

“…Other individual level factors are also relevant. Two of the big five personality traitslow conscientiousness and high neuroticism -have been related both to divorce (Boertien and Mortelmans 2017;Solomon and Jackson 2014) and to unemployment (Egan et al 2017;Uysal and Pohlmeier 2011). Parental divorce is a consistent predictor of marital dissolution (de Graaf and Kalmijn 2006), and the often-accompanying family conflict and singleparenthood increase children's risk of unemployment in adulthood (Caspi et al 1998).…”