Revisiting the Need for Age-Based Norms in Personality

The need for age-based norms in personality assessment is of great interest, given the trend of adjusting for demographic variables in neurocognitive evaluations. We examined the need forage-based norms using the Cleveland Adaptive Personality Questionnaire (CAPQ; Poreh & Levin, 2019) in 1,646 individuals ages 25 to 95 years (M = 44.5, SD = 16.1). Results showed that scores on the CAPQ clinical scales linearly declined across the lifespan in conjunction with a linear increase in measures of social desirability. Power analysis indicated that the CAPQ Avoidantscale produced the most significant effect, followed by a moderate effect for Anxiety, Borderline, Depression, and Paranoiascales, in that order. However, when the social desirability scale served as a covariate, only the Avoidant and Depression scales significantly declined across age/cohort, showing medium and small power, respectively. These findings are consistent with theliterature on other multiscale personality assessment measures. In sum, while age-based norms do not seem to be necessary, a linear regression-based algorithm that controls for social desirability would improve the meaningfulness of personality assessment results across the lifespan.