The Impacts of Response Styles on Black-White Differences in Self-Esteem: An Analysis of Six Samples of Youth. Monitoring the Future. Occasional Paper 16.

Blacks are more likely than whites to use the extreme response categories in Likert-type questionnaire items. This general tendency has important implications for black-white comparisons along self-esteem dimensions. Analyses of several large-scale nationally representative surveys of high school students reveal that (a) blacks score significantly higher than whites when the full scale range is used in computing self-esteem scores, but (b) the black-white discrepancy disappears when a truncated scoring method is employed to control differences in use of extreme response categories. INTRODUCTION The analysis of racial differences has been a popular undertaking for social scientists, perhaps because it is--or seems to be--easy to do, and also because it often yields interesting differences. Certainly this has been the case with self-esteem. However, this paper raises the possibility that the frequent finding of higher self-esteem scores among blacks compared with whites may be attributable, at least in part, to black-white differences in response styles. It is not without trepidation that we enter into areas that have generated so much controversy: black-white differences, the concept and measurement of self-esteem, and the problems introduced by response styles. There is a very extensive literature on the self-concept, which has been reviewed and evaluated by Wylie (1974,19'79). Black-white differences in self-esteem have also been researched and summarized extensively, as we note below. And the issue of whether and how response styles impact on psychological measures has prompted numerous articles and chapters, with titles including "the great response-style myth" (Rarer 1965) and "the acquiescence quagmire" &human and Presser 1981). Although the present paper involves each of these areas to some extent, we do not claim that it will resolve any of the controversies; in fact, it may add to them. Nevertheless, we think this reporting is useful because the findings themselves are clear and consistent, and the issues they raise are important. The literature involving black self-esteem is full of conflicts and contradictions. "Until the late 1960s it was an axiom of social science that white discrimination and segregation depressed and debilitated the psyche of the average black person in this country. " (Taylor and Walsh 1979, p. 242). But a number of recent reports on self-esteem (Rosenberg and Simmons 1972; Taylor and Walsh 1979; Harris and Stokes 1978; Porter and Washington 1979; Simmons, Brown,Bush and Blyth 1978-9) reach conclusions similar to those stated by Drury: "A review of contemporary literature, focusing on studies based on more substantial samples and employing relatively direct measures of self-esteem, provides little justification for the assumption that blacks evaluate themselves less highly than whites. Indeed, the preponderance of evidence supports the opposite conclusion" (1980, p.89). Drury goes on to list 15 comparisons showing higher self-esteem among blacks, five showing higher self-esteem among whites, and four showing no difference. Wylie is appropriately cautious about drawing conclusions based on her review of 59 studies involving racial differences in self-regard, since there are many flaws and idiosyncrasies in the research; still, she takes a view similar to Drury's, stating that the results of these studies 11 . place the burden of proof on those who have contended that the derogated, disadvantaged social position of the blacks in the United States must obviously have resulted in seriously damaged self-esteem in that group" (1979, p. 192).