Çocuk Psikologu

How did Turkish students show response about     self-confidence and self-liking?                

Abstract            

Self-confidence is the confidence that an  individual has in himself/herself, his/her knowledge and abilities. Self-liking, on the other hand, is a subjective evaluation of individual’s behaviors, abilities, personal worth and personal skills. The purpose of this survey is to examine the self-confidence and the self-liking levels of Turkish undergraduate students. Sample is composed of 118 randomly selected participants, ages 20 to 24, who are enrolled at a private university in Istanbul, Turkey. They were asked to answer 8 questions about self-confidence and self-liking. The results had similar tendencies and showed us that they have self-confidence and self-liking. And as the results of research conducted in 2008 by Trzesniewski, Donnellan and Robins; our research showed also there is not an increased level in narcissism.

                                                         Introduction

Self-enhancement and self-perception are the issues that Duguid and Goncalo(2012) were interested in their research. Self-perception means an individual’s attempt to know himself/herself and this attempt based on individual’s attitudes, emotions and inner situation. Being more or less dominant in a situation leads individuals feel better or worst about themselves. This concept’s called self-enhancement. In their research Duguid and Goncalo(2012) indicated the relationship between experienced power condition and perception of own physical height. Result showed that people perceive themselves taller when they feel powerful. The concept of self-enhancement bias which is the exaggeration of an individual’s qualities, is related to cultural differences. In the research of Loughnan et al.(2011) two cultural dimensions, collectivism and individualism are compared. Results of this study showed that if a country has an economic inequality the self-enhancement bias are greater in this country. There’s also a hypothesis about self-enhancement and narcissism increased over the past 30 years. Trzesniewski, Donnelan and Robins(2008) used NPI scores and GPAs to measure this. But they didn’t find an increase in secular trends. Loughnan et al.(2011) indicated the importance of economic inequality and it’s known that economic inequality has increased over the last 30 years. Why the secular trends in narcissism and self-enhancement didn’t increase according to Trzesniewski, Donnelan and Robins(2008)? Because NPI scores and GPAs are limited variables and aren’t enough to test this hypothesis. In the last article, Zell and Alicke used 2 different groups to measure if the level of self-evaluations is related to be in larger or smaller groups. And the research showed that being first in the inferior group shows higher self-evaluations than being last in the superior group. All these researches show the dimensions in U.S and other countries. What do the researches done in the universities of Turkey show  about self-perception and self-enhancement?

                                                        Method

Participant

The investigation was conducted with 118 randomly selected participant, ages 20 to 24, who are enrolled at a private university in İstanbul, Turkey which has an enrollment of 3,000 undergraduate students.

Design and Procedure

We used eight item likert scales, adapted from Tafarodi and Swann(2001), to measure self-confidence and self-liking. Each item on the scale included four chances that ranged from SA (strong agree) to SD (strong disagree). Randomly selected students were asked to fill out the scale. Results were tabulated and analyzed.

                                                          Results

Item four and seven both measured negative self-confidence and the results show similar tendencies. In these two items, the respondents show virtually the same patterns with, over 50% of respondents saying that they have diffuculty completing achievements. Item one and six both measured positive self confidence and the results responses similar tendencies. In these two items, the respondents show the same patterns with, over 50% of respondents saying that they are successful at many things. Item two and five both measured positive self-liking and the results show similar tendncies. In these two items, the respondents show virtually the sama patterns with, over 50% of respondents saying that they feel great about themselves. Item three and eight both measured negative self-liking and the results show diffent tendencies. Item three is about negative attitude about selves whereas item eight is about self-respect is greater than anticipated based on response to item three. İtem three and eight that students did not demonstrate an increased level of narcissism.

                                                       Discussion

The purpose of this study was to examine the self-confidence and self-liking perceptions of Turkish university students. The results indicate that the participants generally exhibited average levels of self-esteem,as demonstrated by frequently selecting the ‘’agree’’ response, regardless of whether it was a self-liking or self-confidence type item.

Our findings on item three and eight provide a further validation for findings of the research about secular trends in narcissism and self-enhancement(Trzesniewski, Donnellan and Robins;2008). Unlike the popular opinion that new generations, especially collage students show high levels of narcissism and our findings supported previous researches and not demonstrate an increased level.

Our findings about other items show an average tendency whether the item is about self-confidence or self-liking. These items show the confidence about selves. Even the items four and seven are about negative confidence, ‘’at times’’ and ‘’sometimes’’ words are very distinctive. So even students choose ‘’agree’’ about these two items, it does not mean that they are not unconfident about theirselves

The strongest problem about our survey is if the eight items are not enough to determine self-confidence and self-liking levels of collage students in Turkey. We asked only two questions about each category negative confidence, positive confidence, negative liking and positive liking. More questions should be used to obtain more accurate results about self-confidence and self-liking. Sample size can be considered as a problem. Many researchs showed that larger samples are more usefull to obtain good results.

Our research can be spearhead for further researches. Self-confidence and self-liking are the subjects that many researchers are interest in and these subjects are not commonly researched in Turkey. Turkey is a multi cultural country so the researches about these subjects may show interesting results.

References

Trzesniewski, K. H. , Donnellan, M. B. & Robins, R. W.(2008). Do today’s young people really think they are so extraordinary? Psychological Science,19,181-188.

M. M. Duguid, J. A. Goncalo. Living Large: The Powerful Overestimate Their Own Height. Psychological Science, 2011; 23 (1): 36-40.

Alicke, M. D., Zell, E., & Bloom, D. L. (2010).Mere Categorization and the Frog-Pond Effect.Psychological Science, 21 (2), 174-177.

Loughnan, S. , Kuppens, P. , Allik, J. , Balazs, K. , Lemus, S. , Dumont, K. , Gargurevich, R…. ,Haslam, N.(2011). Economic Inequality is Linked to Biased Self-Perception. Psychological Science, 22(10), 1254-1258.