Personality and hassles among university students: A three-year longitudinal study

The present study had two goals. The first was to investigate concurrent relations between the five factors of personality and daily hassles experienced by university students. The second was to examine prospective relations between hassles and personality over three years in a two-wave panel design. A sample of 119 university students responded to questionnaires about daily hassles and personality (NEO-Five Factor Inventory) in the first semester and seventh semester. Concurrently, Neuroticism, Extraversion, and Conscientiousness correlated with hassles, whereas Openness to Experience correlated little and Agreeableness not at all. Surprisingly, daily hassles were relatively stable over the three years, but this stability was not mainly due to personality influences. Structural equation models showed that Neuroticism and Conscientiousness predicted two of five hassle scales prospectively. There was also a prospective effect of daily hassles on later Neuroticism. Copyright (C) 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.