Race, gender and pre-adolescent self-structure: A test of construct-specificity hypothesis

Abstract

The present study is an attempt to determine if racial differences are uniformly present in various components of self-esteem structure. Racial differences in self-perceptions have been found in many studies among children and adolescents, but with inconsistent results. According to one explanation for these inconsistences, measures of “self-concept” in the literature are actually measures of different components of a construct with a hierarchical structure. Due to such construct differences, patterns of racial differences might be inconsistent across studies. In the present study it was hypothesized that although African American youth would have higher general self-esteem scores than Whites, racial differences in specific self-beliefs would not consistently favor one group over another. A sample of 637 (299 African American and 338 white) middle school students in two small southern towns were studied. As expected, African American pre-adolescents had significantly higher self-esteem scores. On only a few specific self-belief components, however, were there considerable differences between the two groups. The largest differences in favor of African Americans pertained to self-beliefs regarding appearance and attractiveness, and academic self-beliefs regarding. The reverse direction was present in relation to self-beliefs that reflected self-efficacy and control of events that happened to self.