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

222 SELF-ESTEEM RESEARCH, THEORY, AND PRACTICEVALIDITY REVISITEDWe are at the end of our phenomenological search for self-esteem, whichmeans that I address one last issue. From the beginning, I have stressedthe importance of basing the program on good research as well as onsolid theory. For example, I attempted to show how the program meetsthe criteria for construct validity in two ways. First, we found that a validapproach to understanding self-esteem must be able to accommodateimportant insights and findings made by other researchers, theoreticians,and clinicians. The idea was that validity increases in relation to thedescriptive power of the approach, in this case the ability of a phenomenologicalframework to integrate the major research findings on selfesteem.The approach actually seemed to do quite well in this regard inthat the work on the definitions of self-esteem, the self-esteem paradoxes,and the research findings on self-esteem were all shown to be compatiblewith the fundamental structure of self-esteem and the meaning matrix.Second, it was said earlier that a valid approach would be one that is theoreticallyconsistent. And we just saw how the phenomenologicalapproach uses the definitions of competence and worthiness to movefrom research to theory and end with practice in an extremely consistentfashion.Ideally, I would like to demonstrate the validity of both the theoryand its application with convincing empirical aplomb because that iswhat our society respects the most about the scientific method. If oneaccepts the data of human experience as empirical enough to be subjectto qualitative analysis, then it is likely that we have already demonstratedthe validity of our fundamental finding, which is that self-esteem consistsof both competence and worthiness. But the practical aspect of the programmeans that we are also interested in applying psychological knowledgeto human life, which makes validity a practical, as well as ascientific, issue. Therefore, as a clinician I must insist on more traditionalforms of empirical validation concerning program effectiveness as well.Of course, we can never expect the social sciences to reach the same levelsof “uncertainty reduction” (Tryon, 1991) seen in the natural sciences:scientific expectations must always be tempered by the fact that thingsare more complicated at the lived level than they are in the lab.Nevertheless, there have been considerable advances in studying the effectivenessof psychotherapy over the past 2 decades and some work hasbeen done on using this self-esteem enhancement program in the clinicalsetting.Traditional forms of empirical evidence that lend credibility to a programconsist of reliability and validity. As noted earlier, the reliability of aprogram, or the degree to which it can be implemented in a consistent way