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Coopersmith, S. Coopersmith Self-Esteem Inventory. Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press. School Preview Kit (includes Manual, School Form, and key): $31.50; and Adult Preview Kit (includes Manual, Adult Form, and key): $31.50.
PURPOSE AND NATURE OF TEST
The Coopersmith Self-Esteem Inventory (CSEI; Coopersmith, 1989) was designed to measure the respondent's attitudes toward self in personal, social, family, and academic areas of experience. The publisher claims that the CSEI has been administered to tens of thousands of children and adults participating in research studies or in special education or clinical programs to enhance self-esteem. The hundreds of publications that have reported research about the psychometric properties of the CSEI or that used the CSEI in investigations also attest to the popularity of the instrument.
The author of the CSEI, the late Stanley Coopersmith, received a doctorate in developmental psychology from Cornell University in 1957. For many years, he was a practicing child therapist and a lecturer at the University of California at Davis. Dr. Coopersmith's professional and scholarly interests focused on the development of self-esteem in children, and he constructed the CSEI in conjunction with his program of research on self-esteem. Dr. Coopersmith's main work on the subject appeared in two books, The Antecedents of Self-Esteem (1967) and Developing Motivation in Young Children (1975).
PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS
It is probably safe to say that the CSEI is one of the more popular self-report instruments published during the past two decades. The primary reasons for its widespread use are brevity and simplicity. Specifically, the CSEI is short, consisting of 50 items for children and 25 items for adults. Each item requires a binary response of "Like Me" or "Unlike Me." Furthermore, the CSEI may be administered to groups or individuals in 10 minutes or less, and it is easily hand-scored. Finally, the CSEI generates a total selfesteem score that appears to be reliable and valid.
The CSEI was developed as part of a comprehensive investigation of the antecedents, consequents, and correlates of self-esteem in children that was carried out more than 30 years ago by Coopersmith (1967). In general, in Coopersmith's research program, the term self-esteem referred to the extent to which children regard themselves as competent, successful, significant, and worthy. In other words, Coopersmith's conception of...