Short-Term Dynamics of Pride and State Self-Esteem Change During the University-to-Work Transition

Abstract

Young adults differ in their self-esteem change during the university-to-work transition. The short-term processes related to individual variability in change are not yet fully understood. We examined experiences of pride in daily life as a dynamic process underlying self-esteem change. We followed 238 Dutch master students over 8 months across their university-to-work transition. We used dynamic and multilevel structural equation models to analyze three waves of 14-day experience sampling data. We first examined momentary and daily associations between pride and self-esteem on the within-person level. We then examined the correlation between change in pride and change in self-esteem across months, and the extent to which pride predicted variability in self-esteem change. Results indicated positive within-person associations between pride and self-esteem at the momentary level, but not at the daily level, suggesting that these short-term processes may predominantly unfold across moments. The direction and the magnitude of these short-term associations between pride and self-esteem differed substantially across individuals. Across months, changes in pride were positively correlated with changes in self-esteem, however, pride experiences before graduation did not predict variability in later self-esteem change. Findings suggest that pride may help explain self-esteem change during the university-to-work transition.

Open Peer Commentary and Author Response Regarding ‘Life Events and Personality Change: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis’

“…Our lab has conducted such studies (GradLife: job entry; STRIDE: educational transition; NiMO: motherhood). For job entry, we found dynamic links between daily mastery and personality states (Reitz et al, 2022a) and between pride and self-esteem across days and co-development across the transition (Diwan et al, 2023).…”

Self-Esteem and Social Interactions in Daily Life: An Experience Sampling Study

“…The lack of knowledge about within-day effect sizes from previous research and the complexity of the experience sampling data and multilevel analyses with many parameters complicated a priori power analyses for our specific research questions. However, a previous experience sampling study using the same dataset found enough power to detect small prospective associations for more well-studied momentary constructs such as positive affect (Diwan et al, 2023).…”

“…Trait Self-Esteem as Moderator of the Social Interactions-Self-Esteem Association Considerable individual differences have been found in daily self-esteem processes in previous studies (Denissen et al, 2008;Diwan et al, 2023). Therefore, we aimed to further explore the role of individual differences in the self-esteem-social interactions links.…”

“…The present study made use of pre-existing data. A previous experience sampling study using the same dataset conducted Monte Carlo power simulations and found that a sample of 200 participants was sufficient to detect small prospective associations (.07) between momentary self-esteem and a different momentary construct (pride) in a multilevel-VAR model with more than 80% power (Diwan et al, 2023). A more detailed explanation of these power simulations can be found here: https://osf.io/mfvp2/?view_only=e19f2874c3ef470da8b46fa185c221c1.…”