CHAPTER
6
Measures of Self-Esteem
M. Brent Donnellan1, Kali H. T rzesniewski2and Richard W . Robins3
1Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA;2University of California, Davis, CA, USA;
3University of California, Davis, CA, USA
Self-esteem is one of the most widely studied constructs in the social sciences as it unites basic and applied
researchers from psychology to education to sociology (see e.g., Donnellan, Trzesniewski, & Robins, 2011 ;
Robins, Tracy, & Trzesniewski, 2008a ;Robins, Trzesniewski, & Schriber, 2008b ;Zeigler-Hill, 2013 ). It is also one
of the oldest constructs in scientific psychology as it was first described by William James (see e.g., 1985/1892).
In light of these two facts, it is perhaps unsurprising tha t self-esteem is one of the more controversial constructs
in literature. There are ongoing debates about the caus al role of self-esteem for life outcomes, the degree to
which self-esteem is a cultural universal as opposed to a construct limited to Western/individualistic cultures,
as well as disagreement over whether self-esteem is more trait-like or state-like (see Donnellan et al., 2011 ). In
light of these debates, the assessment of self-esteem is an important and even critic al issue because measure-
ment lies at the heart of empirical research. According ly, the focus of this chapter is to update and extend pre-
vious work detailing the assessment of self-esteem by Blascovich and Tomaka (1991) and Heatherton and
Wyland (2003) .
James (1985/1892) specified that self-esteem is ‘determined by the ratio of our actualities toour supposed
potentialities ’ (italics added, p. 54). Subsequent treatments emphasize that self-esteem involves feelings of self-
acceptance and self-respect (e.g., Rosenberg, 1989 ). In a nutshell, self-esteem is the subjective assessment of
one’s worth as a person. If someone feels good about herself then she is said to have high self-esteem, whereas
someone who feels badly about herself is said to have lo w self-esteem. These self-eva luations need not be tied
to objective standards because the critical element o f the construct is the subjective evaluation. Self-
evaluations can occur with respect to specific domain s, such as athletics and physical appearance, or at the
general level in terms of an overarching evaluation of t h es e l fa saw h o l e .T h ef o r m e rc a s er e f e r st od o m a i n
specific self-evaluations (or domain specific self-est eem) whereas the latter refers to global or general self-
esteem.
Given the subjective nature of the construct, self-este em is typically assessed with self-report scales. There
are apparently many different self-esteem measures and one review article even suggested a figure of 200
(Sheff & Fearon, 2004 ). However, most of these measures are used in frequently and the current research litera-
ture in mainstream journals largely consists of studies based on a relatively small set of commonly used instru-
ments. Indeed, the previous version of this chapter by Blascovich and Tomaka (1991) reviewed just 11
measures of self-esteem and closely related constructs . They concluded that the Ros enberg Self-Esteem scale
(RSE; e.g., Rosenberg, 1989 ) was the most popular measure of the construct as it accounted for at least 25% of
all citations to self-esteem measures in major journa ls. The next closest measure accounted for around 18% of
citations, whereas none of the other measures accounted for more than 10% of the total citations to self-esteem
measures. In other words, a small set of measures accou nted for the majority of citations related to the assess-
ment of self-esteem.
We conducted an analysis similar to the one performed by Blascovich and Tomaka (1991) to estimate the
prevalence of citations to different self-esteem measures. Results are displayed in Table 6.1 . The continued
131Measures of Personality and Social Psychological Constructs.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-386915-9.00006-1 ©2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.