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

Self-Esteem Research Problems and Issues 51There is a limit to researching self-esteem or any other human phenomenonfor that matter by insisting on the methods of the naturalistic paradigm.There are, of course, serious limits to the human science paradigmas well. For example, the human science approach does not establish causeand effect relationships easily, and its work can be more difficult to replicate.The question becomes, then, how do we go about studying selfesteemqualitatively in ways that make a contribution to the field?Qualitative Advances in Researching Self-EsteemThe recent past has seen some genuine advances in applying qualitativemethods to studying self-esteem. For example, several researchers haveused them to investigate important aspects of self-esteem that are nototherwise amenable to traditional methods. Epstein, for instance, tookissue with the appropriateness of doing experimental research on selfesteem.His alternative is an ecological one that may be done in two ways.One is to manipulate self-esteem in what he called “natural laboratories,”where it is possible to obtainMeasures of behavior in specially selected situations where manipulationscould be introduced in a natural manner. Such research can beregarded as using certain events as natural laboratories for the study ofbehavior. We had previously studied sport parachuting as a naturallaboratory for the study of anxiety. . . . Unfortunately, natural laboratoriescan be found for only limited phenomena. For other events, weturned to self-observation of experiences in everyday life. (1979, p. 51)Of course it is desirable to take advantage of such natural laboratories.However, it is difficult to do so with something like self-esteem. Forinstance, it is hard to predict when a naturally occurring self-esteem situationis about to present itself, let alone to identify control versus experimentalsubjects or to repeat events enough times to obtain reliablefindings. Nevertheless, Epstein’s point is a good one: Having subjectsreport on their own self-esteem experience in a way that is relativelystructured and that occurs right after an appropriate event does increasethe value of such results.In Chapter 1 we saw that another version of Epstein’s (1979) ecologicalapproach is to have students track self-esteem over a period oftime. The technique may be used for short periods or longer ones, whichmeans that such a chronicling of self-esteem may be helpful in designinglongitudinal studies, and they are greatly lacking in this field. If selfesteemis a vital force that is generally present in behavior over time, thenwhat better way to study self-esteem in real life than to have people reporton it? One advantage of researching self-esteem in this fashion is that the