Children’s Domain-Specific Self-Evaluations and Global Self-Worth: A Cross-Cultural Meta-Analysis

• In Event: Exploring self-evaluation, self-concept, and self-focus

Abstract

How do you see yourself? When asked this question, an 8-year-old may provide many possible answers, including self-evaluations in specific domains (e.g., “I’m good at sports”) or a global sense of self-worth as a person (e.g., “I’m happy with myself”). Domain-specific self-evaluations have long been thought of as building blocks of global self-worth (James, 1890). This does not mean that all domains are equally important to global self-worth. As William James (1907) argued more than a century ago, people tend to build their self-worth on certain domains more than on others. It is crucial to explore the sources of children’s global self-worth in middle childhood, as it represents a major developmental milestone when children readily incorporate domain-specific self-evaluations into their global self-worth (Harter, 2012). Furthermore, culture prescribes what being a “good person” entails, and self-worth can be understood as the extent to which children view themselves as living up to culture-bound norms and expectations (Bleidorn et al., 2016; Crocker & Wolfe, 2001; Sedikides et al., 2003). Thus, the sources of children’s global self-worth may vary substantially across cultures.
This preregistered meta-analysis presents the first comprehensive, cross-cultural analysis of the relative importance of domain-specific self-evaluation to children’s global self-worth. We explored whether the strength of the associations between self-evaluations and global self-worth varied across six most commonly studied self-evaluation domains: (a) academic competence; (b) peer relations; (c) parent relations; (d) athletic competence; (e) physical appearance; and (f) behavioral conduct (both individually and collapsed across communion and agency dimensions). Further, we examined whether such pattern varied across cultural levels of individualism, which was operationalized by two complementary indices: Hofstede’s individualism index (Hofstede et al., 2010) and a time-sensitive individualism index (Santos et al., 2017).
Data was analyzed in a three-level meta-analytic model, with 596 effect sizes from a total of 31,140 participants in 21 countries/ regions. Children’s physical appearance self-evaluation appeared to be strongest related to their self-worth, and showed a large effect (Cohen, 1988). Children’s self-evaluations of behavioral conduct, peer relations, academic competence, parent relations, and athletic competence were comparatively weaker related with self-worth, but still showed medium-to-large effects (See Figure1). Children’s self-evaluations in agentic dimension (i.e., physical appearance, academic competence, and athletic competence) and communal dimension (i.e., parent relations, peer relations, and behavioral conduct) did not differ significantly in their associations with global self-worth. Importantly, none of these associations varied across cultural levels of individualism (See Table1). As such, this research contributes to the understanding of children’s sources of self-worth, and it suggests a rather developmental universal pattern in middle to late childhood that is remarkably similar across cultures.

Authors

• Yixin Tang, Universiteit Utrecht
  Presenting Author

• Eddie Brummelman, Universiteit van Amsterdam (UvA)

• Sheida Novin, Universiteit Utrecht

• Mark Assink, University of Amsterdam

• Sander Thomaes, Universiteit Utrecht