Abstract
My Multiple Selves (MMS) is an open-ended self-concept measure that leads respondents to systematically explore who they are before selecting and rank-ordering their most important selves. A sample of college students ( n = 204) completed either the MMS or the frequently used Twenty Statements Test (TST). As predicted, results demonstrated that MMS responses included elements underdetected by the TST: other people, school crowd labels, aspirations for the future, and undesirable selves. Furthermore, the MMS revealed that when other people are included in self, they are rank ordered by participants as the most important element. Shortcomings of the MMS are discussed, and directions for future research outlined.
Highlights
Open-ended approaches have long been a popular means of assessing an individual’s self-concept
The primary goals of the current research were to (a) compare directly the My Multiple Selves (MMS) with the TST; (b) test for potential methodological effects due to the order of MMS probes and the number of response slots available; (c) test if legitimizing diverse self-content, a key element of the MMS, would allow those who initially completed the TST to add types of selves not well detected by the TST; and (d) explore perceptions of others who are introjected into self
Tukey’s HSD was computed across the five experimental conditions for each of the 11 categories showing a significant univariate effect within the multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA); those means not sharing a superscript are significantly different at p
Summary
Open-ended approaches have long been a popular means of assessing an individual’s self-concept. These methods, the most often used of which is the Twenty Statements Test (TST; Kuhn & McPartland, 1954), allow measurement of self-definition from the respondent’s personal perspective. [WAI], Bugental & Zelen, 1950) may not capture fully the individual’s relatively enduring set of personally important beliefs about self. We propose a new open-ended self-concept measure, My Multiple Selves (MMS), which assesses what we term the considered selfconcept, that set of self-beliefs that a person provides after being prodded to think deeply and broadly about who one is and asked to identify which of these many self-construals are most central to his or her self-concept. From a humble introduction (see Bugental and Zelen’s, 1950, caution regarding the exploratory nature of the WAI) and a not so well received childhood and adolescence (see Wylie’s, 1974, critical review of the accumulated literature), the WAI/TST (hereafter TST) has become the instrument of choice for those wishing to assess self-concept from the respondent’s point of view (for reviews and critiques, see Gordon, 1968; Grace & Cramer, 2003; Rees & Nicholson, 1994; Spitzer et al, 1970; Wells & Marwell, 1976; Wylie, 1974; Zurcher, 1977)
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