Date of Award

Summer 1978

Document Type

Dissertation - Restricted

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Education

First Advisor

Nordberg, Robert B.

Second Advisor

Pambookian, Hagop

Third Advisor

Gawkoski, Roman S.

Abstract

A key goal for both teachers and parents is the enhancement of children's self-feelings. Education, in order to be really effective, must have as its primary goal helping students develop positive views of themselves. Developmentally, the growth of self-concept and self-esteem begins during infancy, and reviewers of the literature ascribe the greatest importance to the parent-child interactions. Parental acceptance and consistency, which arouse consistent self-evaluations in the child, vitally affect the child's self-concept and result in his acceptance of others and his strivings toward accomplishment. This study was undertaken with two purposes: 1) To identify high and low self-concept children by using methods that have some reliability and have been used in other self-concept research; and 2) To determine if the interaction between parent and child, and the parent's perceptions of the child's behavior vary from one group to the other. Two hundred ninety-eight fifth-graders in the Oak Creek Public Schools were given two paper-and-pencil self-report self-concept scales--the Piers-Harris Children's Self-Concept Scale and the Cooper-smith Self-Esteem Inventory. These were scored and the children ranked for high and low self-concepts, A t-test of the mean scores for the Oak Creek sample and the norm groups on both scales indicated no significant difference between them. Also, there were no significant differences between boys and girls on either scale...

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