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

Self-Esteem Research Problems and Issues 33is interesting to note that starting at nearly the same time, a more sociologicalapproach to the self also began to develop through what is oftenregarded as the Cooley–Mead tradition in sociology (Cooley, 1909;Meade, 1934). Here the self is held to be a largely interpsychic phenomenonthat develops in a social context. As such, the focus is on how othersreact to us, how we react to their reactions, and how those processes leadto the development of self and one’s worth or value in a social context.This sociological view of self-esteem can easily be seen running throughthe work developed by Rosenberg (1965, 1986), Smelser (1989), andothers who tend to emphasize the worthiness component of self-esteem.Whether the self is primarily a psychological or social phenomenonmakes dealing with the self complicated because no matter which perspectiveone starts from, it always leads to the other. The additional factthat this phenomenon may be studied from two overlapping but distinctlydifferent disciplines adds even more complexity to the picture.When psychologists study self-esteem, the methods of introspection, casestudy, and interviews, as well as experimental design, are likely to beused. In contrast, when self-esteem is studied from a sociological perspective,conducting surveys, looking for group norms, and establishingcorrelations among various demographic variables such as race, gender,socioeconomic status, and so on, are more likely to come into play. Theparadox is, of course, that both approaches are valid because the self isthe product of both types of forces from its beginning. However, startingfrom different positions, using different assumptions, having separatepriorities, and working with different methods, serves to create a bewilderingrange of hypotheses, data, and findings to deal with when tryingto understand either self-esteem or the work that has been done on it.Self-Esteem as a Trait versus a StateFor a good while, self-esteem was understood to be a relatively stablecharacteristic, something like personality or intelligence, which gave itthe form of a trait. As such, it was possible to think of self-esteem interms of degrees: high, medium, and low. Historically, much self-esteemresearch, especially that which was based on assessing self-esteem witha unidimensional scale of worthiness, views self-esteem in this way.However, now we know that self-esteem is much more complicated thanthat. For example, it became apparent that self-esteem could also bethought of as involving several factors, or as being multidimensional,with each component making a specific contribution to self-esteem.Another complication is that although people have talked aboutlevels and types of self-esteem for a long time now, these two terms wereoften used interchangeably. Recently, however, researchers began to