Heterotypic stability (Kagan 1980) is a specific type of personality stability. It refers to the extent to which personality traits remain the same with increasing age if the traits are assessed with different methods at different ages, or are assessed with the same measure that however does not show measurement equivalence across age. Heterotypic stability can be empirically measured in longitudinal studies that assess the same individuals at different ages. Similar to personality stability in general (see “Keyword Personality Stability”), heterotypic stability can refer to the constancy of the mean level of a trait (mean-level stability) or to the stability of interindividual differences in a trait (rank-order stability). The alternative is homotypic stability (Kagan 1980) where the traits are assessed with the same measure at different ages and measurement equivalence has been shown (see “Keyword Homotypic Stability”).
Sometimes heterotypic stability is the only choice because of...
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References
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Asendorpf, J. (2017). Heterotypic Stability. In: Zeigler-Hill, V., Shackelford, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8_1861-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8_1861-1
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