Subcultural Influences on Self-attitudes: The Expression of Low Self-esteem in Race/ethnicity-, Age-, Gender-, Social class-, and Generation-differentiated Subgroups

Self-esteem is conceptualized in terms of self-feelings that are evoked by self-evaluation of self-concept and that motivate self-enhancing or self-protective responses. Since (sub)cultural conventions and the self-esteem motive frequently invalidate self-report measures, it is argued that self-esteem should be measured as the confluence of self-evaluative statements and measures of subjective distress. In support of this, findings are presented from a longitudinal multigeneration study that demonstrate variation in the association between self-evaluative statements and reports of emotional distress between groups differentiated according to race/ethnicity, age, gender, social class, and generation. The results clearly indicate that prevalent self-report measures, whether considering total scores or component items, have differential emotional significance depending on groupings.