 One of the key questions in personality research in general is a question about how stable personality actually is. Now when we talk about personality from a psychological perspective, we are talking about people's traits, usually five or six different dimensions of traits. Trait by definition is a stable construct. It should be quite unchangeable, particularly in adults. And a lot of previous research over the past hundred years has actually found this. The personality after the age 30 just remains stable. It's not very changeable as such. However, the question becomes how does this stability of personality actually relate to our lifespan development? One particular lack in previous research was the lack of kind of the older age research. We didn't know what happens to personality beyond say age 40 or 50. There is a possibility that personality stability varies in a very systematic or meaningful way relating to how our lives tend to develop. Specifically, personality, we all know this from previous research, is very unstable or relatively unstable in people in their young adulthood. Imagine people from their 18s through to 30s. That is a busy time of life. Things happen. You finish school, you move out of home, you start a new job, you start a family, you buy a house. Things happen all the time. You have to adapt. From 30-35 onwards, things begin to stabilize. You have your family, you have your kids, you have your job. Your health is pretty standard, if you're lucky. Things go quite stable. And that is when your personality actually begins to stabilize. It reaches a point where it doesn't change that much. From year to year, it's quite the same. However, if you think about it, from, say, about retirement age onwards, things begin to happen to you again. You retire. Your friends and family, unfortunately, pass on. Your health may deteriorate. You may, well, retire from your job and go on cruising the world. It doesn't really matter. Things start to change again. Which then should suggest, if personality is related to our lives or things that happen in our lives, it should suggest that personality stability should decrease. Again, that is, we should become more changeable in terms of who we are and how we see ourselves. So within the NZVS, we conducted a study looking exactly at this. We measured personality at one time point and then we measured it four years down the road. We looked at six dimensions of personality. Extraversion, which relates to people's sociability. Agreeableness, which relates to how agreeable people are, their politeness. Congenitiveness, which relates to how orderly people are, how much they like order, how task-oriented they are. Openness to experience, which relates to how open people are to ideas, to new experiences, to variety in their lives. Neuroticism, which relates to how stressed out people are when something happens in their lives, how moody, so to speak, they are. And finally, honesty, humility, which relates to people's sense of self-entitlement, how much they wish to have luxury goods, for instance. So we measured these in 2009 and then we measured them in 2012. So we have a three-year retest period. What we then did by that measurement is estimated the stability. How much does it change? Finally, to actually investigate how this stability varies across the lifespan, we looked at how this estimate of stability actually changes from age 18 through to age 80. What we found is that overall, as we expected, personality variables are very stable. We would expect this because we're talking about traits. Then what we found is that in younger adulthood, from age 18 through to about 30, personality is very unstable. But as you go through to 30, it tends to stabilize. It increases in stability. Then things remain quite level, about 40, 50. From that point onwards, stability begins to decrease again. Personality becomes more changeable. So what we're looking at here is a systematic pattern of changeability in personality that relates to cumulative effects in our lives. How stable or unstable our lives actually are, which then opens quite a lot of possibilities for research as it suggests that personality may change in relation to meaningful life events. Now, as you can see, these are some very fundamental questions when we're thinking about who we are as people and how we develop. And the New Zealand Etudes and Value Study is quite unique in its ability to actually look at these particular dynamics. Specifically, it is unique because it is a longitudinal study. It follows a large amount of people over time. Also, when we're looking at these dynamics in the New Zealand Etudes and Value Study, we're looking at how they relate to New Zealanders overall because the New Zealand Etudes and Value Study sample is representative. We're not looking at how it develops in students only or a particular small sample of the population. We are looking at New Zealanders overall, which is very, very important, particularly in terms of previous research, which has been based largely on student samples. That is, pick your students, give them a candy and get them to do a questionnaire, which is not representative of what happens to people overall. And if we're looking at development of how we see ourselves, we want to know this. So it is very important for our participants to keep filling in the survey year after year because, as you can see, it is very, very important for research questions as well as how it relates to people's lives.