An Interview with 2018 Tanaka Dissertation Award Winner Manon van Scheppingen
Kathryn Bollich-Ziegler (Interviewer)
1. In a nutshell, what was your dissertation about?
My dissertation was about personality development in the context of parenthood and romantic relationships. I specifically focused on the transition to parenthood. One of the main findings is that this transition does not, as previously hypothesized, predict positive personality development. In fact, using longitudinal data from over 85,000 participants across multiple studies, I found either no change in personality traits or small decreases in traits that are commonly viewed as desirable, such as self-esteem and self-control.
2. What research of yours are you most excited about right now?
I’d like to mention 2 projects I’m excited about:
The first project is a collaboration with my colleagues at Tilburg University and the Dutch Ministry of Health. We study how the corona crisis impacts social relationships and well-being in the Netherlands. We just finished collecting data on social contacts (quantity and quality of social contacts, online and face-to-face contact, and loneliness) in a big representative panel study (the LISS panel). We will compare this to pre-corona measures from 2019. We are currently writing up a report for the government. I've never worked on a project like this before, and enjoy that we share our findings directly with the Ministry.
A second project I’m working on is on educational mobility and personality. Most studies on this topic are cross-sectional, or treat personality as a stable predictor. We will study the relationship between changes in SES (i.e., educational mobility compared to parental education level) and changes in Big Five personality traits in young adulthood.
3. Where do you get your inspiration or research ideas from?
One way for me to get inspiration is by collaborating with people from other fields. My recent postdoctoral training was at the department of sociology, University of Amsterdam. During my postdoc, I’ve been able to broaden my horizon by including theory and methods from sociology and demography into my research on personality development. For example, in one of my recent projects I worked together with social demographer Thomas Leopold to study divorce and change in life satisfaction. We combined methods from demography and psychology into a novel approach to match controls (i.e., married individuals that do not go through divorce) to divorcees in the year of marriage. Based on this novel design, our main contribution was to disentangle changes in life satisfaction that were associated with the divorce process from changes found in individuals who remained married.
Hanging out with my (mostly non-academic) friends and family, and activities outside work (e.g., reading novels) also inspire new research ideas and help me to put my research in a broader perspective!
4. What research or statistical methods are you most excited to see pursued in our field in the coming years?
One of the big questions I focus on is what drives personality development in adulthood. Based on my findings and findings of many others, I believe that we will probably not find one environmental factor that explains the personality changes we find in young adulthood and other life phases. In addition to zooming in on specific life transitions, I think we should therefore examine personality development across multiple life transitions or developmental phases. Sociologists use some interesting statistical approaches to study occupational trajectories, health trajectories, and changes in marital status across the lifespan (e.g., sequence analysis). I think these techniques are promising to examine personality development across a sequence of socially embedded roles.
5. Do you have any advice for grad students? What is the best advice you’ve received?
I do not have any clear-cut advice, but I can say something about my personal experience with finding work-life balance. I started my postdoc while finishing my dissertation; I worked many weekends and did not feel like I had much time to hang out with friends. When talking about this with a friend, I said, “After this deadline, I will finally be able to take some time off”. She replied that this is a risky thought and that I should not postpone taking time off for too long, because after one deadline another will very likely follow. She was right; I definitely did not have less work to do during my postdoc! One thing that helped me to find a better balance was managing expectations of colleagues and collaborators. At the start of the academic year, I now try to plan when I’ll take time off, communicate this early, and not open my email during this time. It is also very important to realize that what works for me does not necessarily work for others; work-life balance means something different to everybody.
Congratulations on your award, Manon!