self :: essays research papers

  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Self-esteem, according to Introduction to Psychology by Dennis Coon, is defined as regarding oneself as a worthwhile person or a positive evaluation of oneself1. This study focuses on the examination of African American adolescent self-esteem based on the independent variables of parental marital status, income, and family structure. Is it possible that these variables could affect a confidence that is supposed to come from oneself? According to Mandara and Murray, these variables greatly affect the self-esteem in African American boys and girls in different but significant ways.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  It was important for me to choose an article that I could relate with and also that interested me. I found this article to have both these qualities and also be the most accurate with several tables and outside references to make it as comprehensive as it could be. I found the material easy to read and understand as well. It also stood out because it was narrowly focused on a specific topic with specific factors. I found other articles that were so broad, I could hardly imagine them having accurate results. Once I chose this topic, the articles available to me were few and far between, which I feel is too bad because it is an important topic and before we can begin helping those adolescents who are lacking self-esteem, we must first find out where the problem originates. Having grown up in a single parent, middle class income family and being the oldest of two children, I feel that I can now understand why I sometimes felt inadequate with myself. The unspoken pressure to make my mom proud and be a â€Å"good† big sister created this inadequacy. This study definitely helped me understand this pressure and proved that unlike my thought at the time, I was not the only teenager going through this enormous drop in self-esteem. Mandura and Murray predicted four outcomes based on the three perspectives formed by Amato & Keith (1991) and Heiss (1996) 2; the family structure, the family income and the family functioning perspectives. First, that the self-esteem of boys not girls would be affected by their parents’ marital status. Second, that both genders would have higher quality of family functioning than single parent households. The third prediction concluded that the effects of marital status on self-esteem would be less if family income was statistically matched with other families. The last hypothesis predicted that family functioning had a greater effect on self-esteem than family structure.