A study on self-esteem and academic background of the students in higher education

Abstract

This paper intends to study the self-esteem and academic background of arts, science and commerce students in higher education and also attempts to find out the relationship between self-esteem and academic background among students in higher education. The researchers used purposive, stratified random sampling technique for selecting the sample comprising of 600 under graduate students from different colleges affiliated to University of Calcutta. Self-Esteem Inventory (SEI) developed by Singh and Srivastava (2010) and self-made Interview Schedule for measuring the academic background of the students was used for collecting data. The collected data were analyzed by using mean, Standard Deviation (SD), percentage, t-test, and Pearson product-moment coefficient of correlation test and accordingly interpretations were made. Result revealed that arts and commerce students are significantly different from the science students in respect of level of self-esteem; but however no significant difference was noted in the level of self-esteem between arts and commerce students. The researchers also observed that there is no significant difference in the academic background between arts and commerce students however, the academic background of science students was found to be relatively better than arts and commerce students. It was noted that there is a significant positive relationship between self-esteem and academic background among the students pursuing their studies in higher education.