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Progress of the project:

The project entitled “A study with the HEXACO personality model on a sample of adolescents - EMERGE” started regularly in December 2019. The aim of the first phase of this project was to develop and validate a new personality measurement for adolescents (10-14 years old), which could also evaluate behaviours and aspects that have been little investigated so far (based on the HEXACO model; where the 6 personality traits measured are: H= Honesty-Humility; E= Emotionality; X= eXtraversion; “A= Agreeableness; C= Conscientiousness; O= Openness to experience).
In the first months of work, we developed the measures to create the questionnaire that was then administered to the children and their parents. As far as the measure of personality is concerned, we used 384 statements describing the way of being or behaving (e.g. "I am a sociable boy/girl" and for each statement boys/girls must express how “true" it is). All statements were selected and adapted from the adult questionnaire (the HEXACO Personality Inventory-Revised). From all these statements, in the data analysis phase, the "best" should be selected for the final questionnaire. The other measures we used are those defined as "criteria". They were selected as reference terms for certain behaviours/adjustments, to establish whether the statements in the HEXACO-adolescents questionnaire (whose definition and construction is the purpose of this phase) do measure what they are intended to measure. For example, we wanted to check whether the statements concerning the "Conscientiousness" trait are linked to the measures taken as a reference criterion for conscientious behaviours. Among the chosen criteria, there are measures of risk and addictive behaviours, a personality measure for adolescents and a questionnaire on emotion regulation. Additionally, we used an objective criterion measure using the school grades for the first quarter.

Once all the material had been prepared, the project together with the selected measures was submitted to the ethics committee of the Department of Psychology of the University of Campania "Luigi Vanvitelli" for approval. At the same time, we made contact with the seven lower secondary schools in the Campania region (click here to see the list) that collaborated on the project.

After the first telephone contacts, the project was formally sent to the School Managers. We took care of explaining the different steps and ways of involving students and their parents, especially with regard to the privacy and anonymity of the data, using alphanumeric codes it was possible to match the questionnaires of the girls / boys with those completed by their respective parents.

The first data collection took place during the month of May. Due to the spread of Covid-19 we had to remodulate the times and methods of administering the materials (as also by the Rector's resolution, DR n. 334). However, also and above all thanks to the active collaboration of the School Managers and the professors involved, we were able to successfully complete the data collection. More than 800 questionnaires were filled out by students and their parents.

At the moment, we are analyzing the data collected with the questionnaire, with the aim of selecting the statements that will make up the definitive personality questionnaire.