Developmental study of ordinal position and personality adjustment of the child as evaluated by the California Test of Personality.

The present study was designed to explore the relationship between ordinal position and personality adjustment. The California Test of Personality was administered to 272 fifth-graders, 242 eighth-graders, and 341 eleventh-graders. Data from the three grades were analyzed separately. Previous studies of the relationship between ordinal position and the mental health status of children have involved such important methodological problems or have been so limited in coverage of age groups that few generalizations have been established. The data for this study were obtained in the context of a large personality assessment project. Subjects were 855 white pupils enrolled in 12 schools in three Chicago suburbs, one a working-class community, one a heterogeneous but predominantly lower-middle-class community, and the third an upper-middle-class community with a preponderance of persons in professional and managerial occupations. The analyses of variance indicated that the first-borns earned higher adjustment scores than the later-borns in grades five and eight, while a similar trend at the eleventh-grade level failed to reach statistical significance.