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

The Crucial Issue of Defining Self-Esteem 5a 10-year period, and their impact was so great that it is still reverberatingthroughout the field today.During the late-1980s to mid-1990s, two converging forces workedtogether to push the social significance of self-esteem into a much largersocial arena. One of them originated with a group of academicians andpoliticians in California who emphasized to the general public the possibilityof a link between individual self-esteem and major social problems,such as substance abuse, welfare, and teen pregnancy. As Mecca, Smelser,and Vasconcellos said,The well-being of society depends on the well-being of its citizenry. . . .The more particular proposition that forms our enterprise here is thatmany, if not most, of the problems plaguing society have roots in the lowself-esteem of many of the people who make up society. (1989, p. 1)Perhaps in response to the zeitgeist of the time, maybe as a result ofthe high profile from which this group benefited, or simply because itseemed to make so much “common sense,” this position generated abroad base of political and social support. For the first time, self-esteemwork received considerable financial backing. Like never before, interestin self-esteem made its way to other parts of society, particularly into theeducational setting (Beane, 1991; Damon, 1995). At the same time, selfhelpand popular psychology markets got aboard the self-esteem bandwagonand spread interest in the topic to even wider social arenas,including the media. The result of such a concatenation of events was adramatic rise in programs aimed at enhancing self-esteem in primaryschool systems and a significant increase in the number of books and discussionson self-esteem throughout the nation. In short, the large butonce quiet field of self-esteem achieved social significance through whatis now commonly known as the “self-esteem movement.”However, popular interest is a double-edged sword. In addition toobvious benefits, such as more research funding and more people workingin the field, bringing a scientific concept to the public forum can alsoresult in negative forms of attention. The most important of these appearsto have been a second, countervailing, social force operating on selfesteemduring this period that took the form of a backlash against thetopic. Early signs of what might be called “self-esteem bashing” or evenan “anti–self-esteem movement” began to appear in social commentarieswith eye-catching titles such as, “The Trouble with Self-Esteem” (Leo,1990) or “Education: Doing Bad and Feeling Good” (Krauthammer,1990) that appeared in popular weekly news magazines. Such criticism ofself-esteem spread to various segments of the popular media during theremainder of the 1990s (Johnson, 1998; Leo, 1998). However, a more