Adaptation of Rosenberg´s Self-esteem scale and EBEPS-A© Self-esteem Subscale on Portuguese students

1. IntroductionThe study of students' self esteem is of great importance, as the level of self esteem influences the wellbeing of the students, the choice of courses, academic acquisitions and the achievement of curriculum goals (Marsh, 2005; Tagarro & Veiga, 2014). Having gained increasing attention globally, self-esteem studies aims at improving the understanding of the self in different contexts, to comprehend and predict behavior and create measures to provide better interventions (Marsh & Craven, 1997). A picture of oneself involves cognitive, emotional and behavioral attitudes and this seems to reflect in the motivation, commitment, pleasure and creativity that students demonstrate in their academic life (Tagarro, 2012; 2013). Hence, it is important that self esteem is studied using appropriate tools.Coopersmith (1967), Garcia (1998) and Peixoto (2003) define self-esteem as the assessment that the individual makes of himself, expressing an attitude of approval or disapproval and that shows the competence that the subject possesses to believe in himself, his capabilities and value. Additionally, the way others see us seems to have a great importance on self-esteem. Onate (1989) states that how others see us influences our conception of actual self and ideal self that is used as a reference according to social and family expectations. Peixoto (1998) states that it is the distance between the actual self and the ideal self that defines self-esteem. Alcantra (1990) defines selfesteem as an attitude about oneself while Valles and Valles (1995) define it as the feeling of liking oneself, taking pride in what one does, thinks or feels, being responsible, expressing emotions, accepting difficulties, and getting along with others. Due to this, self-esteem is considered a onedimensional construct by some authors (Andrews, 1998; Hattie 1992 cited by Peixoto, 2003). 2. Purpose of the StudyThe purpose of this study is to analyze the psychometric properties of two instruments; Rosenberg's Self-esteem scale (Rosenberg, 1979) and the Psychosocial Wellbeing Scale - EBEPSA© (Galinha & Loureiro, 2005; 2006) subscale of Self-esteem on two samples of Portuguese students.The research questions that guided the study were as follows:Q1. Will the psychometric qualities of the self-esteem measures be appropriate for Portuguese students? Q2. Are the instruments one-dimensional or bi-dimensional? Q3. What are the psychometric characteristics of the instruments? To understand this issue, two investigations were conducted for the psychometric validation of these instruments relating to self-esteem.3. Methodology3.1Study 1: Rosenberg's Self-Esteem Scale (1979)3.1. 1InstrumentRosenberg's Self-Esteem Scale (1979) consists of 10 items and measures the feelings of respect for and acceptance of oneself. Half of the items are positive and the other half are negative, organized in a Likert scale of four points ranging from strongly agree = 4, agree = 3, disagree = 2 and strongly disagree = 1. Romano, Negreiros and Martins (2007) obtained, in a sample of 501 teenagers, a Cronbach's alpha of 0.63 for the items that saturate in factor 1 (which measures negative self-esteem ) and 0.74 for the items that assess positive self-esteem (factor 2). Regarding the validity, they found in factor 1 an eigenvalue of 3.33 and 1.29 in factor 2 which explained 46.03 % of total variance. The study by Albo, Nunez, Navarro and Grijalvo (2007) found just one factor of the instrument with an acceptable internal consistency (0.88) and temporal stability. The differing results from these studies as related to the factor number underscores the importance of a deeper investigation of the factor analysis of this instrument.3.1.2SamplingBefore the instrument was applied on a larger sample, it was deemed necessary to first conduct a pilot study on a sample of 19 university students in order to identify any weaknesses of the instrument particularly in its translation into Portuguese, or characteristics of the application process. …