Materials
The Interpersonal awareness and social interaction questionnaire measured both variables (appendix 16). Personality was measured via the International Personality Item Pool (IPIP; Goldberg, 1999) via 50 closed question statements on a 5 point Likert Scale ranging from 1 (very inaccurate) to 5 (very accurate). Extroversion was measured from items 1-10, items 11-20 measured Agreeableness, items 21-30 Conscientiousness, items 31-40 Emotional Stability which is the opposite to Neuroticism, with items 41-50 measuring openness to experience. Items 6, 7, 8, 10, 17, 18, 19 and 20, 27, 28, 29, 30, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40 48, 49 and 50 were reverse scored (appendix 2). A simple statement was used to determine participants beliefs regarding their self esteem with a ‘yes’ answer suggesting a high self esteem and ‘No’ a low self esteem (appendix 3).
Controls
The questionnaire was clear and easy to read whilst also being replicable; therefore, each participant received the same questionnaire in the same format.
Standardized Procedures
Participants were approached on a face-to-face basis and invited to participate in the survey. Researchers selected 2 males and 2 females with a student and non-student being approached within both gender groups. Participants were instructed to carefully read and approximate which statement applied to them in relation to their personality scales and to give a reasonable estimation to their belief regarding self esteem.
Ethics
Informed consent was sought as participants were told what the task would involve and that answers would be confidential. No names were taken and answers did not have to be truthful preventing the occurrence of evaluation apprehension. Participants were also aware of their right to withdraw from the investigation at any time and were given approximations of the time needed in this case approximately 15 minutes.
Results:
Descriptive Statistics:
Figure 1: Means and Standard deviations
Assumptions:
The sample size is sufficient with 162 participants. There is univariate normality for 3 out of the 5 conditions at each level of the IV (ps = >.05) (appendix 6). Emotional stability is not significant at one level of the IV (p = .01) and agreeableness is not significant at any level of the IV (ps < .05). Given these minor violations, it can be assumed that the data are normal. There is no problem with multicollinearity/singularity (correlations between the DVs fluctuate from -.24 to .27) (appendix 5). Scatter plots signify no curvilinear relationships among the variables (appendix 10). After the removal of one outlier the maximum Mahalanobis distance is 18.01 for high self esteem and 14.71 for low self esteem beliefs. The critical value of c2 with 5 DVs and p < .001 is 20.52 so there’s no problem with outliers (appendix 7). The variances were homogenous (Fs<1)except for Conscientiousness (F = 1.19). Given these minor violations, it can be assumed that the variances are equal for each dependant variable (appendix 4).
Inferential Statistics:
Figure 2: Multivariate Test
There was a significant main effect between personality and individual self esteem beliefs F(5, 165) = 12.92, p <.001, Wilks’ λ= .71. After applying Bonferroni adjustment, there was a
significant main effect with the personality traits extroversion (F(1, 160) =41.60, p<.001), and emotional stability (F(1, 160) =17.35, p<.001). There were no differences regarding Agreeableness, Conscientiousness and openness (Fs<1).
Discussion:
Previous research suggested a strong relationship between personality traits and perceived self esteem beliefs (, , as cited in Rubinstein, 2006). In support a one-way independent MANOVA calculation (appendix 9) demonstrated a statistically significant main effect between personality and individual self esteem beliefs and represents a large effect size F(5, 165) = 12.92, p<.001, Wilks’ λ= .71, partial η2 = .293. Further analysis in the form of a Bonferroni adjustment shown that with p < .01 the personality traits of agreeableness, conscientiousness and openness did not differ significantly. However, there was a statistically significant main effect with the personality traits extroversion (p<.001) and emotional stability (p<.001). Furthermore the box and whisker plots (appendix 12 and 13) and descriptive statistics (appendix 3) show that self esteem beliefs show a greater effect upon extroversion and emotional stability.
The use of closed question questionnaire limited the study. A Likert scale was used to measure personality traits (see appendix 2) by preventing participants being influenced into a decision through restricting their choice. This, however, may predispose participants into a decision making process with choices such as “moderately inaccurate” producing confusion, false data and confounded results through interpreting questions differently. There is also an issue of response acquiescence set; therefore the questions were alternated into a positive and negative manner, reverse scoring some of the set questions (Harvey, 1999).
These findings are important in assessing the relationship between personality factors and perceived individual self esteem beliefs. Due to the importance of personality traits upon numerous life events such as employment opportunities (Barrick & Mount, 1991), academic accomplishments (Robins, John, & Caspi, 1998), personality disorders (Costa & Widiger, 1994) and relationships (Cramer, 1993) as cited in Robins et al. (2001) the influence of self esteem beliefs upon personality may have important implications. Individuals who perceive themselves to have a low self esteem, for example, may be more introverted due to lacking the self confidence to engage in social situations (Robins et al., 2001) which may negatively affect their experience of life events. If self esteem influences personality, as this investigation suggests, then improving self esteem may allow individuals who are deemed introverts to become more extroverted and hence improve life situations. However, these findings demonstrate no causal relationship between self esteem and personality factors, as there is no indication as to whether high or low self esteem results in certain personality traits or if personality traits influence self esteem beliefs more research, therefore should be undertaken to discover in what direction the relationship lies.
References:
Farmer, R. F., Jarvis, L. L., Berent M. K. (2001). Contributions to global self-esteem: The role of importance attached to self-concepts associated with the Five-Factor Model. (Vol. 35, pp. 483-499).
Goldberg, L. R. (1999). A broad-bandwidth, public domain, personality inventory measuring the lower-level facets of several five-factor models. Personality Psychology in Europe, (Vol. 7, pp. 7-28). Tilburg, The Netherlands: Tilburg University Press.
Harvey, J. (1999). Guidelines for writing good questions. Evaluation cookbook. Learning Technology Dissemination Initiative. Retrieved January 10, 2008. From the World Wide Web:
http://www.icbl.hw.ac.uk/Itdi/cookbook/info_guidelines_for_questions/index.html#endhead
John, D., & MacAarthur, C. T. (2004). Self-Esteem. Research Network on Socioeconomic Status and Health. Retrieved January 2, 2008. From the World Wide Web:
Lewis, J., Bentley, C., Sawyer, A. (1980). The relationship between selected personality traits and self-esteem among female nursing students. Educational and Psychological Measurement, (Vol. 40, No. 1, pp. 259-260).
McCrae, R. R., Costa, P. T. (2003). Personality in adulthood, a five-factor theory perspective (2nd ed.). New York: Guilford Press.
Nurmela, K. (2007). Relationships between self-esteem, personality characteristics, and body image. Winona State University. Psychology Student Journal. Retrieved January 2, 2008. From the World Wide Web:
http://course1.winona.edu/CFried/journal/current.html
Robins, R. W., Tracy, J. L., Trzesniewski, k., Potter, J., & Gosling, S. D. (2001). Personality correlates of self-esteem. Journal of Research in Personality (Vol, 35, pp. 463–482)
Rubinstein, G. (2006). The big five and self-esteem among overweight dieting and non-dieting women. (Vol. 7, pp. 355-361).
Trzesniewski, K. H., Robins, R.W., & Roberts, B. W. (n.d.). Personality and Self-Esteem Development Across the Life Span. Retrieved January 2, 2008. From the World Wide Web:
Zhang, L. (2006). Thinking styles and the big five personality traits revisited. Personality and Individual Differences (Vol. 40, pp. 1177–1187)
Appendix:
Appendix 1: Section of Interpersonal awareness and social interaction questionnaire measuring self-esteem:
18) Do you have high self esteem? Yes [ ] No [ ]
Appendix 2: Section of Interpersonal awareness and social interaction questionnaire Measuring Personality
On the following pages, there are phrases describing people’s behaviours. Please use the rating scale below to describe how accurately each statement describes you. Describe yourself as you generally are now, not as you wish to be in the future. Describe yourself as you honestly see yourself, in relation to other people you know of the same sex as you are, and roughly your same age. So that you can describe yourself in an honest manner, your responses will be kept in absolute confidence. Please read each statement carefully, and then circle the appropriate number.
Response Options 1: Very Inaccurate
2: Moderately Inaccurate
3: Neither Inaccurate nor Accurate
4: Moderately Accurate
5: Very Accurate
Appendix 3: Descriptive Statistics
Appendix 4: Levenes Test of Equality of Error Variances
Appendix 5: Correlations testing for Multicollinearity/Singularity
Appendix 6: Multivariate Normality Test
Appendix 7: Test for Outliers: Mahalanobis distance
Appendix 8: Test of Between Subject Effects
Appendix 9: Multivariate Tests
Appendix 10: Scatterplots
Appendix 11: Box and whisker plots showing relationship between agreeableness and self esteem beliefs
Appendix 12: Box and whisker plots showing relationship between emotional stability and self esteem beliefs
Appendix 13: Box and whisker plots showing relationship between Extroversion and self esteem beliefs
Appendix 14: Box and whisker plots showing relationship between conscientiousness and self esteem beliefs
Appendix 15: Box and whisker plots showing relationship between openness and self esteem beliefs
