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This study examines the determinants of personal self-esteem, racial self-esteem, and personal efficacy in a 1980 national sample of black Americans. The findings show that the three dimensions are interrelated and each is anchored in interpersonal relations with family and friends. However, the three dimensions are produced by fundamentally different processes. Personal self-esteem is most strongly influenced by microsocial relations with family, friends, and community, while personal efficacy is generated through experiences in social statuses embedded in macrosocial systems of social inequality. We conclude that black self-esteem is insulated from systems of racial inequality, while personal efficacy is not, and suggest that this explains why black Americans have relatively high self-esteem but low personal efficacy. The belief that racial discrimination, rather than individual failure, accounts for low achievement among blacks is irrelevant to personal self-esteem and personal efficacy. In contrast, racial self-esteem is produced by a combination of education, interracial contact, and ideological processes.Two major dimensions of self-perception known to be positively correlated are self-esteem and personal efficacy. Somewhat surprisingly, black Americans have relatively high self-esteem but relatively low personal efficacy. There is no widely accepted, empirically supported explanation for this apparent inconsistency. Most studies in this area have

Abstract:A review of the literature indicates that (a) very little attention has been devoted to measurement problems plaguing the study of self-esteem and (b) few studies employ more than one type of self-esteem instrument. This study addresses these issues by using eight measures of self-esteem involving self-reports, ratings by others, and a projective instrument. Their intercorrelations are examined to provide preliminary validational evidence; then, confirmatory factor analysis is used to construct measurement models and further assess the validity of the measures. The results suggest that two traditional questionnaires and a personal interview are valid in measuring experienced self-esteem, and three measures involving ratings by others are valid in measuring presented self-esteem These findings are consistent with previous multidimensional conceptualizations of self-esteem, indicating that a variety of methods is necessary to adequately measure selfconcept.

ࡗ Families With Young Children: A Review of Research in the 1990s Research conducted in the past decade on families with young children concentrated on 5 broad topics: (a) the transition to parenthood; (b) the importance of maternal sensitivity for children's attachment security and subsequent adjustment and social competence; (c) the effectiveness of particular parenting styles and practices; (d) interparental, familial, and broader societal factors influencing parenting behaviors and child adjustment;and (e) the impact of family structure and household composition on children's well-being. Our review documents substantial diversity in family structures, parenting arrangements, and childrearing values and practices both within and across ethnic and racial groups. Collectively, the evidence suggests that in most families with young children, parents and children seem to be doing well. We conclude that substantial work is required to expand the study of families with young children beyond mother-child dyads in White, middle-class, two-parent, first-marriage families.Families with young children remained a vital concern of researchers and practitioners in the

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Although theoretical attention has been devoted to the situational variability of the self-concept, empirical investigations continue to rely on one-shot methodologies. Such efforts assume that data obtained through these methods can be generalized to other situations in the person's life, even to subsequent years or stages in the life course. Self-concept is a structural product of reflexive activity, but it is also susceptible to change as the individual encounters new roles, situations, and life transitions. The data reviewed in this paper suggest that: (i) self-evaluation generally becomes more favorable through the life-span; (ii) self-evaluation is represented by a "moving baseline" from which situational fluctuations emerge; (iii) self-concept is characterized by both stability and change over the life course; and (iv) environmental stability plays an important role in self-concept stability. Several avenues of research are recommended to develop an accurate, meaningful, and testable theory of the self-concept over time. Article: INTRODUCTIONMost researchers view self-concept as a set of structured self-attitudes that is relatively stable and "characteristic" of an individual. While numerous studies have examined structural dimensions of self-concept, very few have focused on temporal aspects of self-concept, i.e. changes in self-concept from one situation to another, from one relationship to another, or from one year or stage in the life course to the next. As a result, little is known about the social conditions responsible for change and stability in self-concept.This review demonstrates that the dominant structural conceptualization of self-concept and the concomitant failure to study the dynamic, changing, emerging qualities of self-concept, are the products of three related and widespread methodological practices in self-concept research: (i) a preoccupation with one-shot measures of self-esteem, (ii) an overreliance on samples of adolescents and college students, and (iii) the tendency to measure self-esteem in detached classroom and experimental situations.The objective of this paper is to integrate social psychological, sociological, and developmental research on self-concept. I argue that to understand self-concept we must conceptualize it as a moving baseline with fluctuations across situations (Demo 1985) and life stages. This involves recognizing that the self-concept is simultaneously a complex structure and a process, that it is stable, but that it is also dynamic. I also argue that to capture the dynamic qualities of self-concept it is necessary to obtain repeated measurements and to include naturalistic observations. I move now to a brief review of the evidence that self-concept has both structural and processual qualities, recognizing that this evidence corresponds to two general models used by self-concept researchers and that different points of view exist within each model. THE STRUCTURAL MODELMany researchers and theorists view self-concept as a multifaceted structure of thoughts, att...

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