ABSTRACT
A major interest of the Texas Adoption Project (TAP) has been in personality. What people can say about personality based on an adoption study depends on how well people can measure it. In considering which assessments to use, we began with the test that had been given to most of the birth mothers while residing at the home for unwed mothers. Although the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) is sometimes used for assessing personality variation among normal persons, its chief focus is on psychopathological traits. People wanted to use some measures focused on normal personality as well, at least in the adoptive families. There were sixty-four of the original TAP families in which there were at least two adopted children with MMPIs for both birth mothers. The chapter presents an analysis of the changing of parental ratings over occasions of ratings for adopted and biological children. That analysis was based on the 125 children rated all three times.
