Topic Modeling of Ego Development Levels: Corpus-Driven Research

The ego development theory elaborated by Loevinger (1976) greatly improved the understanding of personality changes. Withing the framework of the theory assessment of ego levels is based on analyzing verbal production in the Washington University Sentence Completion Test (WUSCT; Hy & Loevinger, 1996). Theoretical aspects of ego development are suggested to have an indirect representation in textual data of 2,443 respondents. The general purpose of this study is to reveal ego development levels in the topic text structure through analysis of the topics appearing at each level. The topic modeling approach seems to open a whole range of new opportunities in investigating personality development and to improve personality assessment on a language use basis. A thorough analysis of non-intuitively interpretable topics enables revising previous theoretical and empirical findings on personality development. Keywords: personality development, ego development theory, topic modeling