Self-esteem Overtime among Chinese from 2000 to 2015

The debate of whether the change in self-esteem may reflect unique cultural heritage or the improvement in social ecological environments is ongoing. The prior work found that self-esteem increased in the United States but remained similar in Australia based on the temporal analyses of the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale. To further test this question, a temporal meta-analysis of self-esteem in China was conducted. On one hand, Chinese experienced rapid economic development in the past few decades, which brings a great change in the social ecological environment, which may possibly in turn lead to an increase in self-esteem. On the other hand, collectivistic values are prevalent in China, which may make the norm of positive self-regards less salient, which may possibly in turn lead to a stable trend of self-esteem in China. Based on the 296 identified published articles, the analyses revealed that an increase in self-esteem overtime was observed among college students whereas the level of self-esteem did not change among middle school students and community participants between 2000 and 2015, suggesting that the cultural change in self-esteem is only notable among college students. The current research demonstrates the complexity of cultural change over time.