title: Religiousness, spiritual seeking, and personality: findings from a longitudinal study.
abstract: The hypothesis that personality characteristics in adolescence can be used to predict religiousness and spiritual seeking in late adulthood was tested using a structural equation modeling framework to estimate cross-lagged and autoregressive effects in a two-wave panel design. The sample consisted of 209 men and women participants in the Berkeley Guidance and Oakland Growth studies. In late adulthood, religiousness was positively related to Conscientiousness and Agreeableness, and spiritual seeking was related to Openness to Experience. Longitudinal models indicated that Conscientiousness in adolescence significantly predicted religiousness in late adulthood above and beyond adolescent religiousness. Similarly, Openness in adolescence predicted spiritual seeking in late adulthood. The converse effect, adolescent religiousness to personality in late adulthood, was not significant in either model. Among women, adolescent Agreeableness predicted late-life religiousness and adolescent religiousness predicted late-life Agreeableness; both these effects were absent among men. Adolescent personality appears to shape late-life religiousness and spiritual seeking independent of early religious socialization.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA 02481-8203, USA. pwink@wellesley.edu
authors.forename: Paul
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Wink
authors.forename: Lucia
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Ciciolla
authors.forename: Michele
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Dillon
authors.forename: Allison
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Tracy
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000294:Adolescent Behavior / Q000523:psychology*; D000328:Adult; D000375:Aging / Q000523:psychology*; D002140:California; D003243:Consciousness; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008137:Longitudinal Studies; D008297:Male; D010553:Personality Development; D012069:Religion and Psychology; D012649:Self Concept; D012933:Social Identification; D012945:Social Values; D029181:Spirituality; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires