Basel, Switzerland. Self-esteem increases during adolescence, then slows in young adulthood; there is no significant difference between men's and women's self-esteem during either of those life phases.

Researchers found that in adolescence, Hispanics had lower self-esteem than blacks or non-Hispanic whites, but Hispanics' self-esteem increased more strongly. By age 30, they had higher self-esteem than whites. At age 30, whites also trailed blacks in self-esteem.


Researchers at the University of Basel looked at data from the Young Adults section of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, a U.S. national probability survey that was started in 1979 and included an oversampling of blacks and Hispanics. The sample drawn from the Longitudinal Survey consisted of 7,100 individuals age 14-30.

• Forty-nine percent were female;
  
• 37 percent were white,
  
• 32 percent black,
  
• 20 percent Hispanic; and
  
• 11 percent other ethnicities.

The researchers, led by Ruth Yasemin Erol, MSc, assessed the participants every two years from 1994 to 2008. They tested how five personality traits affect self-esteem.

• openness,
  
• conscientiousness,
  
• extraversion,
  
• agreeableness and
  
• neuroticism.

In addition, they looked at the subjects

• sense of life mastery,
  
• risk-taking tendencies,
  
• gender,
  
• ethnicity,
  
• health and
  
• income.

"We tested for factors that we thought would have an impact on how self-esteem develops," Erol said. "Understanding the trajectory of self-esteem is important to pinpointing and timing interventions that could improve people's self-esteem." Their findings appear in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Consistent with prior research, Erol and her colleague Ulrich Orth, PhD, found that blacks have higher self-esteem than whites in both adolescence and young adulthood. Even when they controlled for a sense of mastery, or the perception of control over one's life, the researchers found ethnic differences remained. The same was true regarding mastery when they compared the self-esteem of men and women.

"The converging evidence on gender similarity in self-esteem is important because false beliefs in gender differences in self-esteem may carry substantial costs," Erol said. "For example, parents, teachers and counselors may overlook self-esteem problems in male adolescents and young men because of the widespread belief that men have higher self-esteem than women have."

Mastery had a strong positive effect on the subjects' level of self-esteem, according to the study. In contrast, income did not influence the level or shape of the self-esteem trajectory in adolescence and young adulthood, the researchers found.

"The present research suggests that, in particular, emotional stability, extraversion, conscientiousness and a sense of mastery are important predictors of the self-esteem trajectory in adolescence and young adulthood," they wrote.

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