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

Self-Esteem Research Problems and Issues 41Construct validity, or “the degree to which certain explanatory conceptsor constructs account for performance on the test” (Wells &Marwell, 1976, p. 153), is another way to achieve a meaningful degree ofvalidity in self-esteem testing. This type of validity is based on the connectionsbetween a particular self-esteem test and the theory or definition ofself-esteem that a researcher or clinician is using in his or her work. If thetheory is well constructed and if the test questions embody the majorcomponents of self-esteem as they are expressed by the theory, then themeasure at least has a certain logical integrity or theoretical validity.Unfortunately, such tests are usually transparent and easily manipulated bythe subject. Even so, they can be useful, providing a clinician is only interestedin using the instrument to open up a discussion of self-esteem or todevelop a general sense of it. This “practical” approach to validity is oftenfavored by clinicians, because the here-and-now concerns of identifyingbasic self-esteem issues and problems for clients are more important thanmeasuring self-esteem with academic precision or waiting for researchersto achieve a meaningful degree of consensus on a particular issue. Not surprisingly,such face validity is by far the most common one in this field.PROBLEMS GENERATED BY USINGTHE SCIENTIFIC METHODThe next group of problems faced by self-esteem researchers occurswhen we try to investigate this phenomenon scientifically. Proponents ofso-called “pop psych” (self-help) approaches to self-esteem do not haveto deal with these knotty issues. For the rest of us, there are certainmethodological problems that invariably arise in self-esteem research andassessment due to the presence of two scientific paradigms (one quantitative,the other qualitative) and the question of their validity.Methodological Diversity in Researching Self-EsteemA few major self-esteem researchers and theoreticians grapple with thefact that there is considerable methodological diversity in the psychologyof self-esteem. The most thorough and comprehensive work in this regardis that of Wells and Marwell (1976), whose entire book is devoted to thesubject. Rather than attempt to duplicate this classic, I will refer to it asthe leading authority. The Social Importance of Self-Esteem (1989) byMecca and colleagues updated this information but did not change it.The list of methods used to study self-esteem is fairly typical of the socialsciences in general. It has been studied introspectively (Epstein, 1979),with case studies and interviews (Bednar, Wells & Peterson, 1989;