The Lifespan Self-Esteem Scale: Initial Validation of a New Measure of Global Self-Esteem

ABSTRACT

This article introduces the Lifespan Self-Esteem Scale (LSE), a short measure of global self-esteem suitable for populations drawn from across the lifespan. Many existing measures of global self-esteem cannot be used across multiple developmental periods due to changes in item content, response formats, and other scale characteristics. This creates a need for a new lifespan scale so that changes in global self-esteem over time can be studied without confounding maturational changes with alterations in the measure. The LSE is a 4-item measure with a 5-point response format using items inspired by established self-esteem scales. The scale is essentially unidimensional and internally consistent, and it converges with existing self-esteem measures across ages 5 to 93 (N = 2,714). Thus, the LSE appears to be a useful measure of global self-esteem suitable for use across the lifespan as well as contexts where a short measure is desirable, such as populations with short attention spans or large projects assessing multiple constructs. Moreover, the LSE is one of the first global self-esteem scales to be validated for children younger than age 8, which provides the opportunity to broaden the field to include research on early formation and development of global self-esteem, an area that has previously been limited.

Funding

This material is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship under Grant No. 1650042. Any opinion, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Notes

¹ One single-item scale has been developed and tested with children as young as 9: the Single-Item Self-Esteem Scale (SISE; Robins, Tracy, Trzesniewski, Potter, & Gosling, 2001).

² There are too many groups to report all mean scores, but descriptive statistics are available on request.

³ The final sample included one individual who was 93 years old. However, we restricted the oldest age group to ages 80 to 89 for simplification and ease of presentation, given that results did not differ when including the 93-year-old. Thus, for all analyses using continuous age, ages ranged from 5 to 93, but for all analyses using the 11 age-stratified groups, ages ranged from 5 to 89.

⁴ All effect sizes reported are standardized beta coefficients.

⁵ There are too many groups to report all mean scores, but descriptive statistics are reported in the Supplemental Online Materials.