Are the Big Five Personality dimensions uniformly relevant to understand the forgiveness of children?

Pages: 852-857
Geeta Ahirwar, Gyanesh Kumar Tiwari, and Pramod Kumar Rai (Department of Psychology, School of Humanities & Social Sciences, Dr. Harisingh Gour Vishwavidyalaya, Sagar, Madhya Pradesh)

The basic goal of the study was to understand the role of extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability and openness dimensions of Big Five personality in impacting the nature and extent of children’s forgiveness. The study chooses three hundred children with equal number of males (M = 10.01, SD = 0.85) and females (M = 10.00, SD = 0.90) with age ranging from 7 years to 11 years. The Big Five Questionnaire-Children (Barbaranelli, Caprara, Rabasca, & Pastorelli, 2003) and forgiveness vignette of children (Goss, 2002) were used to measure personality and forgiveness of the children, respectively. The findings exhibited that the female children significantly achieved higher mean scores on conscientiousness and emotional stability dimensions of personality as compared to the males while no gender differences were observed in the extraversion, agreeableness and openness personality traits. Conversely, the male children showed significantly higher achievement in the mean score of forgiveness as compared to their female counterparts. The extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness and emotional stability dimensions of personality showed significant positive correlations with the scores of forgiveness of the male children while significant as well as non-significant negative correlations were recorded among these scores for the female children. Irrespective of gender, non-significant positive correlations were recorded among these scores for children. Gender and, extraversion and conscientiousness personality dimensions contributed significantly to the scores of forgiveness of children. The study observed a significant role of personality in understanding forgiveness of children. The findings have theoretical and practical implications for researchers, parents, teachers and educational policymakers. Directions for future research and limitations of the study have been presented.