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Global and Ethnic Self-esteem in School Context: Minority and majority groups in the Netherlands

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Abstract

There is a considerable body of research that has explored the impact of school characteristics on the self-esteem of racial and ethnic minority group children. This work, however, has been mainly conducted among African Americans and has various conceptual and methodological problems. The present large-scale study in 182 classes from 82 schools has tried to go beyond this research by focusing on different groups of early adolescents in the Netherlands and by using multilevel analysis. This analysis allows to examine the importance of both individual and classroom determinants for personal global and ethnic self-esteem. It was found that both global self-esteem and ethnic self-esteem depend partly on the classroom context. Multi cultural education and teachers' reactions to ethnic harassment affected self-esteem positively. In addition, the proportion of Dutch pupils affected ethnic self-esteem among ethnic minority groups negatively but not that of the Dutch. Furthermore, ethnic minority group participants were found to possess higher ethnic self-esteem and higher global self-esteem than the Dutch. In addition, boys had more positive self-esteem than girls.

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  1. Department of Social Sciences, Utrecht University, P.O. Box 80.140, 3508 TC, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Maykel Verkuyten & Jochem Thijs

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  1. Maykel Verkuyten
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  2. Jochem Thijs
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Verkuyten, M., Thijs, J. Global and Ethnic Self-esteem in School Context: Minority and majority groups in the Netherlands. Social Indicators Research 67, 253–281 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1023/B:SOCI.0000032339.86520.5f

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/B:SOCI.0000032339.86520.5f

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