Theses and Dissertations from UMD

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New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM

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2012 - 20142

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Author: search.filters.author.Schussler, Laura ElizabethSubject: search.filters.subject.Temperament

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    The Distribution of Gender Differences in the Temperament and Social Competence of Preschoolers
    (2014) Schussler, Laura Elizabeth; Teglasi, Hedwig; Counseling and Personnel Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    The literature has shown gender differences on many temperament and social competence (SC) measures, though there are gaps in understanding where differences lie and whether it varies by informant. This study investigated how temperament relates to SC and whether gender is a moderator. Rater source and the use of standardized versus raw scores and how they influence gender as a moderator was a main focus. Temperament was measured by the CBQ (Putnam & Rothbart, 2006) and the newly-developed CBQ, Teacher Form (CBQ-T; Teglasi, Schussler, & Gifford, under review). SC was measured by the SCBE (LaFreniere & Dumas, 1992), and all measures were administered to the parents and teachers of preschoolers (N = 113; M age = 57 months). For temperament, findings supported the fact that rater agreement is low and holds true for both genders. On the temperament scales on which parents significantly differed from teachers, parents tended to rate boys more favorably than teachers. The hypothesis that teacher ratings would yield more gender differences than parents was supported. There were also more differences in variability between genders for teacher ratings, revealing that teachers tended to provide more extreme ratings. Scales with distributional differences were ones that have consistently yielded gender differences. For SC, girls had significantly higher means on several scales with raw scores, and raw scores produced more temperament x gender interactions for parent ratings. Activity Level and Anger had opposite effects for gender with higher activity predicting higher SC for girls and lower SC for boys, and higher anger predicting higher SC for boys and lower SC for girls. On Sadness, there were opposite rater effects with Sadness positively associated with SC for parents and negatively associated for teachers. There were fewer gender differences for teachers when considering correlations of temperament and SC. Overall, findings support the importance of obtaining information from parents and teachers about children's temperament and SC. Moreover, these results suggest that raw SC scores are more useful than standard scores for studying relations between SC and temperament, particularly with parent raters. Shortcomings included a limited sample precluding full examination of distributional differences.
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    THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE CHILDREN'S BEHAVIOR QUESTIONNAIRE, TEACHER VERSION (CBQ-T)
    (2012) Schussler, Laura Elizabeth; Teglasi, Hedwig; Counseling and Personnel Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Information is provided about the development of a teacher version of the Children's Behavior Questionnaire Short Form (CBQ Short Form; Putnam & Rothbart, 2006). The CBQ Short Form, designed for caregivers, was modified by changing the item wording for the preschool classroom and is termed the CBQ, Teacher Version (CBQ-T). Both measures were administered to the caregivers and teachers of preschoolers ages 3 to 6 years. The CBQ-T was found to be as reliable as the CBQ Short Form with two scales falling short of adequate internal consistency. Few correlations were found between parents and teachers in accord with literature documenting low to moderate agreement between the two raters. Several temperament scales were correlated with age for parents and teachers, none were correlated with gender as rated by parents, and several were correlated with gender as rated by teachers. Further validation of the CBQ-T with varying populations would be beneficial.