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Over the past 40 years, the concept of place itself-esteem has assumed an important the field of social psychology. A computer search of the literature (Kitano 1989) found over 6,500 article titles that explicitly used the term "self-esteem" and over 30,000 titles that used the term "self' in some hyphenated form, many of which also dealt with self-esteem (e.g., self-concept, self-evaluation, self-respect, self-confidence).
Looking at the general body of research on self-esteem today, it is evident that most of this literature deals with global self-esteem, that is, the individual's positive or negative attitude toward the self as a totality. In the last decade, however, a number of writers have stressed the importance of studying specific self-esteem, as well (e.g., Harter 1985; Marsh 1986; Marsh and Shavelson 1985; Swann 1987). As Marsh (1990) expresses it: "More recently, self-concept theory has stressed the multi-dimensionality of self-concept, and empirical studies have identified distinct, a priori facets of self-concept" (p. 107).
The aim of this paper is to shed light on the nature and relevance of global and specific self-esteem and their relationship to each other. We begin by focusing on two general features of attitudes to clarify the distinctions we make regarding self-esteem. First, the study of any attitude, and self-esteem is an attitude, must take account of the fact that people may have attitudes both toward an object as a whole (global or general) and toward specific "facets" of that object (Marsh 1990). For example, a student may have attitudes toward her university as a whole, but she may also have different attitudes toward a specific department, the quality of the faculty, or the attractiveness of the campus. Although the differences between global and specific attitudes are sometimes overlooked, they are not equivalent or interchangeable. This point applies equally to self-esteem, which can be viewed as an attitude toward an object, even though the holder of the attitude and the object toward which the attitude is held--the self--are the same (Rosenberg 1979).
A second feature of attitudes is that they include both cognitive and affective elements. That attitudes are cognitive is evident from the fact that they refer to objects--an attitude represents some thought about a particular thing (e.g., person, material object, group, idea, etc.). That they...