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The long-term stability of self-esteem: its time-dependent decay and nonzero asymptote.

  • Kuster F Department of Psychology, University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland. farah.kuster@unibas.ch
  • Orth U
  • 2013-03-13
Published in:
  • Personality & social psychology bulletin. - 2013
Adolescent
Adult
Age Factors
Aged
Aged, 80 and over
Female
Humans
Individuality
Longitudinal Studies
Male
Middle Aged
Self Concept
Socioeconomic Factors
Time Factors
Young Adult
English How stable are individual differences in self-esteem? We examined the time-dependent decay of rank-order stability of self-esteem and tested whether stability asymptotically approaches zero or a nonzero value across long test-retest intervals. Analyses were based on 6 assessments across a 29-year period of a sample of 3,180 individuals aged 14 to 102 years. The results indicated that, as test-retest intervals increased, stability exponentially decayed and asymptotically approached a nonzero value (estimated as .43). The exponential decay function explained a large proportion of variance in observed stability coefficients, provided a better fit than alternative functions, and held across gender and for all age groups from adolescence to old age. Moreover, structural equation modeling of the individual-level data suggested that a perfectly stable trait component underlies stability of self-esteem. The findings suggest that the stability of self-esteem is relatively large, even across very long periods, and that self-esteem is a trait-like characteristic.
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  • English
Open access status
green
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https://sonar.ch/global/documents/201548
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