A Meta-Analysis of Self-Worth Scale for Adolescents

Journal of Psychological Science ›› 2014, Vol. 37 ›› Issue (3) : 625-632.

PDF(5681 KB)
PDF(5681 KB)
Journal of Psychological Science ›› 2014, Vol. 37 ›› Issue (3) : 625-632.

A Meta-Analysis of Self-Worth Scale for Adolescents

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Abstract

The multidimensional multilevel self worth model for adolescents developed by Huang (1998) is a representative and widely adopted self-esteem model in China. Based on this model, a 13 factors Self-Worth Scale for Adolescents was designed. This questionnaire included: global self-worth (6 items); individual self-worth (5 items); social self-worth (5 items), and other individual and social sub-self-worth factors, they are interpersonal, psychological, moral, physiological, and family (4 items in each factor). In the last decade, there were more than one hundred studies used this instrument to study the Chinese adolescents' self-worth. However, there is no article until now making a comprehensive review on those findings, although some of the findings contradict each other. Besides that, the multidimensional multilevel model not only allowed us to test the gender difference and age characters of the self-esteem as some existed reviews, but also provided us to test those topics both in general and specific level. In current study, meta-analysis was introduced to systematically re-analyze datum of Self-Worth Scale for Adolescents collected from researches published from 1998 to 2011 in China. The results of meta-analysis showed that the adolescents' self-worth has improved in the last decade. Compared with the national norm of the self-worth scale, adolescents reported higher self-worth in all dimensions and levels; male and female both reported higher self-worth than the national gender norms respectively, however, no reliable gender differences were found in all self-worth factors. After categorized all the data into three age groups, different age patterns were found: for the undergraduates, their self-worth higher than the corresponding national norms; senior high school age students' individual-oriented special psychological and social-oriented special mortal self-esteem were lower than the norms; junior high school age students' individual-oriented special psychological and social-oriented mortal, physiological interpersonal self-esteem were lower than the norms. We also analyzed some variables that potentially affect results out of the adolescents' self-esteem data, such as region of the sample, the year and quality of publication, purpose of study, and so on. There are no systematic effect was found contributing the variation of the adolescents self-esteem. So we got our main finding of this study: with the age increased, the self-worth (self-esteem) of today’s Chinese adolescents raised, there are no gender differences generally; the sample publication quality and purpose have no effected generally on self-worth. Based on the findings in the current study and the features of the papers used the self-worth scale for adolescents, we suggest more studies using this instrument should be introduced to explore the out of school youth’s self-esteem; the instruments should be used more in multi variables analysis, experiment studies, and in more formal way that fulfills the requirements of psychometrics.

Key words

Self-Worth Scale for Adolescents, effect size, meta-analysis

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A Meta-Analysis of Self-Worth Scale for Adolescents[J]. Journal of Psychological Science. 2014, 37(3): 625-632
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