Self-Esteem Research, Theory, and Practice Toward a Positive ...

40 SELF-ESTEEM RESEARCH, THEORY, AND PRACTICEunstable, fragile, or pseudo self-esteem, are defensive. They resist admittingto ordinary human failings let alone low self-esteem, consciously orotherwise. Instead of reporting such insecurity about their competence orworth or both, they deny it and can even overcompensate instead. Theresult is that not only are their scores elevated, but also more importantly,they are simply wrong. In addition to creating difficulties in terms ofdeveloping good norms, such a problem can present crucial issues in clinicalwork. In other words, without tests that have some means of identifyingsuch “defensiveness,” as it is often called, these complications aresure to cause the researcher or clinician to miss an entire range of seriousself-esteem problems. Probably the best way to deal with the issue is todevelop validity scales, such as those of the Minnesota MultiphasicPersonality Inventory (Hathaway et al., 1989). Although such an exhaustiveapproach is not practical, it is reasonable to expect a good self-esteemtest to at least alert us to the possibility of excessive deception and defensiveness.Sadly, few tests even come close to being helpful in this regard.Test Validity: A Question of LimitsEven if a self-esteem test addresses all of the issues mentioned earlier, westill have to know whether, and to what extent, a given instrument is valid.Although written more than 3 decades ago, the review by Wells andMarwell (1976) still does an unparalleled job of examining the technicaldifficulties involved in developing self-esteem tests. Their work describedhow self-esteem measures can be evaluated against three traditional indicatorsof test validity. The highest type of validity such an instrument canhave occurs when test items or tasks predict a particular outcome accurately.Unfortunately, such “criterion validity” is unlikely to occur withself-esteem tests, in part because it is such a complex phenomenon.Content validity is another approach and is based on whether thetest questions are connected to self-esteem in some logical way. Forinstance, it is possible to define what kinds of behaviors or attitudes aremost likely to be associated with high and low self-esteem, and thendesign questions that ask about them. This type of validity increases withthe thoroughness of the questions: The more the test covers the wholerange of factors thought to reflect self-esteem, the greater the validity ofthe instrument. We know that there are a good number of such selfesteemtests, but with the exception of a few, most of them are so briefthat they cannot hope to be considered valid because they are based onan incomplete definition of self-esteem. Furthermore, even when bothcompetence and worthiness are covered by a test, brevity often takesprecedence over comprehensiveness because short tests are easier toadminister and score than longer ones.