Cross-National Comparability of the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale

A growing interest in the measurement of constructs in international settings and the comparison of people in different countries and cultures on these measures has led to greater sensitivity to issues of conceptual equivalence and differences in cultural norms. Such issues are relevant not only when languages and cultures appear to be very different, but also when individuals from different countries share the same language. The Rosenberg Self-Esteem (RSE) scale was chosen as the measure of interest in the present study because it is one of the most widely used measures of self-esteem worldwide. A total of 543 American, 1443 Canadian, and 300 New Zealand university students completed the RSE. Results indicated that the factor structure of the RSE was essentially unidimensional for each country. All items showed factor loadings greater than .40 in each country. Item-level analyses only revealed the presence of significant differential item functioning (DIF) for one item. Overall, these findings suggest that the RSE can be used to to make comparisons of selfesteem across American, Canadian and New Zealand students. Introduction The Rosenberg Self-Esteem (RSE) Scale is one of the most widely used measures of selfesteem worldwide so it is surprising that relatively little research has explored cross-national differences on this measure. To date, only two studies appear to have compared English versions of the RSE across different countries (Feather, 1998; Lennon, Rudd, Sloan, & Kim, 1999). Feather (1998) found that American students had significantly higher self-esteem scores when compared to Canadian and Australian students. Lennon and colleagues (1999) found that Caucasian American female students had significantly higher scores on the RSE than Korean and Singaporean female students, and African American students had significantly higher self-esteem scores when compared to all three other groups. These findings from previous research must be interpreted with caution because there has been no psychometric evidence to support the cross-national generalizability of the RSE. Heine, Lehman, Markus, and Kitayama (1991) have argued that self-concept research has been largely based on a North American perspective and one cannot assume that our ideas about self-concept will generalize to other social and cultural settings. Whether an instrument is cross-nationally invariant is a key concern when extending theories and their associated constructs to other countries (Hui & Triandis, 1985). Assuming that a measure is functioning equally for all groups without supporting empirical evidence