The strength of the relationship between various measures of self, such as self-esteem, self-concept,
self-acceptance, and achievement has been studied extensively with varying results (see Hansford
& Hattie, 1982). This variation may be attributable to the use of different self and achievement measures,
ranges in the age of those studied, and not controlling for socioeconomic status, ethnicity/race, gender, or
school effects.
The main goal of my thesis was to estimate the strength of the relationship between self-esteem,
and achievement when gender, ethnicity/race, socioeconomic status, aspects of the parent-child relationship
and school contextual effects were controlled. Analyses were conducted on two large data sets. The first
was taken from the National Educational Longitudinal Study (NELS) - 1988 and consists of 21,039 grade
8 students sampled from the United States. The second data set was taken from the School-Based
Prevention Project (SBPP) - 1995 and consists of 6,795 grade 8 through 12 students from 20 schools in
British Columbia, Canada. For both data sets, 7 of 10 items from the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (1965)
were used to measure self-esteem.
Analyses of the NELS data set yielded three notable findings: (1) the strength of the self-esteem/
achievement relationship is not equivalent across gender-ethnic/racial groups, (2) the self-esteem/
achievement relationship varies when grades versus tests scores are used as achievement measures,
and (3) the variability in self-esteem is largely within-schools. Variables controlled in these analyses were
gender, ethnicity/race and socioeconomic status.
Analyses of the SBPP data yielded four notable findings: (1) the strength of the self-esteem/
achievement relationship varies across a new measure of coping styles, (2) relational factors reduce
the strength of the self-esteem/achievement relationship, (3) relational factors explain much more of the
variance in self-esteem than does achievement, and (4) almost all the variance in self-esteem is within schools. Variables controlled in these analyses included gender, grade-level, socioeconomic status,
perceptions of Mother's and Father's love, and coping styles.
The theoretical implications of these results are discussed in terms of attachment theory
(Ainsworth, 1969), coping styles (Horney, 1950), and the need to belong (Baumeister & Leary, 1995).
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/9496 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | Buller-Taylor, Terri |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Relation | UBC Retrospective Theses Digitization Project [http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/retro_theses/] |
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