Self-Esteem, Stereotyped Thinking And Locus Of Control In African-American Children

Abstract

The relationship between self-esteem, locus of control and stereotyped thinking were investigated in this study. Subjects were thirty-two kindergarten (six boys and twenty-five girls), thirty-seven second grade (twenty-one boys and seventeen girls) and thirty-six (fourteen boys and twenty girls) fourth grade students. The measures used were Harter's Self-Perception Profile for Children (SPPC), Connell's Measure of Perceived Control (MPC) and a stereotyped thinking measure previously used by Bigler and Liben. MANOVAs revealed grade effects for control measures. Fourth grade subjects were increasingly internal and had higher global self-esteem scores. Although correlational analyses did show that internal control and global self-esteem were both significantly negatively correlated with stereotyped thinking, other significant correlations were few in number and they tended to be small. possible reasons for the lack of significant effects include small sample size and instability of the measures; internal consistency was very low.