Parent-Child Profile Similarity and Aggression: A Preliminary Study

This investigation was directed toward studying the relationship between parent-child personality similarity and adolescent aggression and to illustrate the utility of a general method of assessing profile similarity suggested by Overall (1964). Peer and teacher ratings of aggression were used to group eighth-grade boys on manifest aggression. Ss and their parents (volunteers) were administered the MMPI. The d∗ measure of dissimilarity was used to compare parent-child profile configurations in the three aggression groups. Although the small and biased sample preclude major conclusions, the results support the use of the d∗ statistic for assessing MMPI profile similarity and suggest that further work in the area of parent-child personality similarity might be fruitful.