The Course and Correlates of Personality Development in College Women, 1980

The aim of this study was to compare and evaluate social learning theory and organismic developmental theory on the basis of data concerning the course and correlates of female personality development. Participants were 125 Radcliffe College seniors (Class of '81) who volunteered for the research by completing a 17-page mailed questionnaire. The sample represents 21% of all women in the class of 1981. The self-administered questionnaire included the Gough Adjective Check List, the Loevinger Sentence CompletionTest, and a questionnaire which assessed family background, occupation and education of parents, evaluation of parents' personality traits and of student's rela tionships with her parents, career and family plans and aspirations, parental influences on the participant, feelings about college, and description of ideal self. Many of the items in the questionnaire were drawn from two other Murray Archive data sets: Barnett's Vocational Planning of College Student Women: A Psycho-Social Study (00069), and Birnbaum's Life Patterns, Personality, and Self-Esteem in Gifted Family-Oriented and Career-Committed Women (00001). The Murray Archive holds additional analogue materials for this study (125 completed questionnaires, and numeric file data for 124 participants). If you would like to access this material, please apply to use the data.