ABSTRACT
The constructivist approach has favoured the view that personality proceeds through a series of developmental stages which continue right through the life-span and which may necessitate change in order to be negotiated. From the personality theorist’s perspective, the aim of life-span research has been to demonstrate continuity in its strongest form: that personality, once formed, remains stable. Life-span psychology is concerned with mapping the changes that occur in psychological characteristics, particularly intellectual and personality variables, as individuals grow older. The problem of interpretation of age changes is rooted in the fact that longitudinal designs confound age changes with time of measurement. The cross-sectional design solves the problem inherent in longitudinal research by unconfounding age change and environmental change. Life-span psychology has been characterised by three contrasting models of development: the stability model, the ordered change model and the dialectical model.
