Assessment of character strengths in children and adolescents

Abstract

For more than a century, psychology has been fascinated with the clichéd question " what is wrong with you, Johnny ?" Since the dawn of this millennium, positive psychology has seriously urged psychologists to also probe into a much deeper and a loftier question, " what are you good at, Johnny ?" Psychologists have been asking the former question in copious ways through formal and informal, objective and subjective, and normative and ipsative psychological assessments. The latter question has unfortunately remained unasked, leaving the positive aspects of Johnny largely unpacked and underexplored. A bibliographic database search (as of July 2, 2012) of PsycINFO and ERIC (accessed through CSA Illumina 1 ) with scoping search using descriptors assessment and psychopathology and children and adolescents covering the period of 2000 through 2012, yielded 24,129 peer reviewed journals article whereas only 3,330 articles were found when the descriptor psychopathology was replaced with strengths . This clearly suggests that we have just started exploring the intact aspects of Johnny and we have a long way to go in understanding what is wrong with Johnny as well as what is strong about him. Our central point, in this chapter, is to underscore the importance of exploring the positive aspects of Johnny without dismissing, minimizing, or avoiding weakness. To make our case, we underscore the shortcomings of a deficit model of assessment for children and adolescents, and define a strength-based assessment and the benefits of exploring strengths. Positive psychology posits that the use of signature strengths - The highest strengths that individuals believe are most core to who they are - is associated with greater well-being and less psychological distress. This notion has been well tested with adults (e.g., Linley et al. 2010 ; Rust et al. 2009 ; Mongrain and Anselmo-Matthews 2012 ; Seligman et al. 2005 ). However, this assertion has not been widely tested with children and adolescents. Major shortcoming of these studies is that signature strengths, almost exclusively are determined by one self-report measure, (usually VIA-IS [Values in Action - Inventory of Strengths], explained later in the chapter) which ranks top five strengths. We find determination of signature strengths, based on one self-report measure, limiting. Signature strengths of children and adolescents should be assessed considering their context which inherently includes a number of adults including their parents, teachers, coachers, siblings, peers, friends...etc .