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Self-esteem: The Rosenberg self-esteem scale is designed to measure a person’s
sense of self-worth. The concept of self-esteem has a singular component (or to
use the technical language of assessment, it is “unidimensional”). Grit, you’ll
recall, was two dimensional: perseverance and passion. Even so, measuring self-
esteem still requires several questions.
The United States Department of Education has used a version of the self-esteem
scale in surveys of tens of thousands of American schoolchildren. Students can
respond “strongly agree,” “agree,” “disagree,” or “strongly disagree” to a series
of seven items:
- I feel good about myself.
- I feel I am a person of worth, the equal of other people.
- I am able to do things as well as most other people.
- On the whole, I am satisfied with myself.
- I certainly feel useless at times.
- At times I think I am no good at all.
- I feel I do not have much to be proud of.
In this case, items can be scored from 1 to 4, since four response options were given.
For the top four items, “strongly agree” is scored 4, while “strongly disagree” is
scored 1. The bottom four items are known as reverse-coded items, where
“strongly agree” is scored 1, while “strongly disagree” is scored 4. In the reverse
coded items, the construct is framed in negative terms, which is why the scores
run in the reverse order. Scores across all items can be combined to form a self-
esteem score.
These examples show how the structure of an assessment flows directly from the
definition of the construct. In defining our construct, we list its component parts,
and each component part forms the basis of a question that we ask.
Question 3: How Have Other Researchers Measured What You’re
Trying to Measure?
After you have defined what you want to measure, the next step is to review the
scholarly literature on the topic. Has someone in the past tried to measure your
construct or any of its component parts? The only way to answer this question is to
do a thorough review of the literature.
A literature review can be tedious. Embrace it. This is not simply a perfunctory
step, something boring to be done before you begin the real work of writing ques-
tions and collecting data. It is the foundation of your entire project.
If you’ve reached this step, you have already developed a clear definition of the
construct you hope to assess – which means you’ve built a list of the construct’s
component parts. When doing a literature review, you’ll want to search by name for
articles covering your construct – and you’ll also want to search for studies covering
the component parts.
C. Hitt