Personality
Which kids end up taking music lessons, and why?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
How long young children had taken music lessons was best predicted by how open to new experiences their parents were, not mainly by the child's intelligence.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Cross-sectional — Single-time-point correlational study; child IQ tested, parents reported demographics, child personality and their own Big Five personality; hierarchical regression predicting cumulative months of music lessons.
- N
- N=170 · 170 children aged 7-9 with one parent reporting; 98 of them had any music training (income data missing for four).
- Population
- 7- to 9-year-old children and their parents from a middle-class Toronto community sample
- Outcome
- Cumulative months of extracurricular music lessons
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Key findings
Longer training went with being older, higher family income, more parental education, more non-music activities, higher IQ, higher child openness and agreeableness and lower neuroticism. The strongest single correlation was with the parent's openness to experience (r = 0.30). In the final model, which explained 22.0% of the variance, age and parental openness were significant predictors, and the IQ link disappeared once personality was taken into account.
Methodology
The researchers tested 170 children aged 7 to 9 on a short IQ test and asked a parent to report family income, education, other activities, the child's personality and their own personality. They then used step-by-step regression to see which of these predicted how many months of music lessons the child had taken.
Limitations
It is a one-time correlational study, so it cannot show that parental personality causes lesson-taking, and no genetic data were collected even though the interpretation is about gene-environment correlation. The same parent rated both their own and their child's personality, which could inflate the parent-child link. Lesson duration was reported retrospectively, the sample was middle-class and above-average in IQ, and the authors note that results may not apply outside Western lesson-based music cultures.
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