Explaining the relations among children's actual and perceived performances and self-esteem: A comparison of several causal models

Used structural equation methods to compare various causal models of the relation between children's performances and self-esteem. Analysis was based on cross-sectional data collected from 415 children from 6th-8th grades. Ss' GPA, athletic performance, self-esteem, perceptions of academic ability, perceptions of sociometric status, and lists of peers they liked were analyzed. Models in which self-esteem affected perceptions of popularity fit the data better than models in which the reverse or reciprocal effects were posited. It appears that for ambiguous attributes, such as popularity, a self-consistency bias operates whereby children's self-esteem affects how popular they think they are. For more verifiable attributes (i.e., academic and athletic achievement), perceptions of achievement are more strongly related to actual achievement, and they are more likely to affect self-esteem rather than the reverse. (45 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved).