Abstract

With the inherited temperament, a child affects the responses of others by selecting certain aspects of environment to deal with or avoid and modifying ways of expressing what he choses to accept. The increasing importance of temperament in develpment of children stimulated researchers to develop instruments for assessing the temperament. The present study was designed to explore the possibility that the RITQ developed by Carey and McDevitt (1978) can be used with Korean infants. In addition, temperamental characteristics of Korean children were compared with American a very and Taiwanese children. The result showed a very high level of reliabiltiy and internal consistencey of RITQ. Factor analysis and cluster analysis of RITQ items suggested the following four dimesions : -sociability, expressiveness, stabiltiy, and biological consistency. It was found that these four dimensions were more reasonable and similar to the concepts proposed by other researchers. In cross-cultural analyses, the face validity of RITQ was camparable across different cultures. The differences in temperament between children with oriental backgrounds were smaller than the difference between those with oriental and occidental background.