Abstract
Morality, competence, and sociability have been conceptualized as fundamental dimensions of social judgment that individuals use to evaluate themselves and other people and groups. The way in which adolescents perceive themselves along these dimensions affects the quality of their relationships across multiple social contexts. Given the centrality of morality, competence, and sociability for adolescents’ social life, the purpose of this study was to understand how these dimensions develop over time with a focus on gender differences, since males and females can show distinct trajectories due to socialization and developmental processes. Participants were 916 (51.4% girls; Mage = 15.64 years) adolescents involved in a three-wave longitudinal study with annual assessments. The findings highlighted that females reported increasing levels of morality and competence, while males showed decreasing levels in all dimensions. Furthermore, females also showed greater consistency in the configuration of morality, competence, and sociability, and inter-individual differences appeared to be already well-settled in each dimension for both males and females. Overall, this study increases the developmental understanding of how core dimensions of social judgment change in the adolescent phase, highlighting gender differences and similarities.
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Notes
As a preliminary step, longitudinal measurement invariance (Little 2013; Van de Schoot et al. 2012) was tested. Thus, for each dimension the configural (baseline), metric (in which factor loadings were constrained to be equal across time), and scalar (in which both factor loadings and item intercepts were constrained to be equal across time) models were compared. Model comparisons were conducted considering changes in fit indices (e.g., Chen 2007). Findings indicated the establishment of the three levels of longitudinal measurement invariance for all study constructs.
A further confirmation of this can be obtained by rank ordering at each wave observed scores of morality, competence, and sociability for males and females separately. For males the first dimension was, at each wave, sociability; whereas for females it was morality.
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Authors’ Contributions
E.C., S.M., and M.R. conceived the current study; E.C. performed the statistical analyses. E.C., S.M., and M.R. wrote the manuscript; all authors (E.C., S.M., G.K., W.M., R.Z., M.R.) participated in the interpretation of the results and in the drafting of the article; R.Z. is the principal investigator of the POSIDEV project and is responsible for the data collection. All authors read and approved the final paper.
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Data of the POSIDEV study were used for this study. POSIDEV was funded by the European Social Fund under the Global Grant measure, VP1-3.1-SMM-07-02-008 assigned to Rita Žukauskienė. Silvia Moscatelli and Monica Rubini received support for working on this article by a grant from the Italian Ministry of Research and Education, University and Research FIRB2012 (Protocollo RBFR128CR6_004) assigned to Silvia Moscatelli.
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Crocetti, E., Moscatelli, S., Kaniušonytė, G. et al. Developing Morality, Competence, and Sociability in Adolescence: A Longitudinal Study of Gender Differences. J Youth Adolescence 48, 1009–1021 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-019-00996-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-019-00996-2