School Life and Adolescents' Self-Esteem Trajectories

This study investigates heterogeneity in adolescents' trajectories of global self-esteem (GSE) and the relations between these trajectories and facets of the interpersonal, organizational, and instructional components of students' school life. Methodologically, this study illustrates the use of growth mixture analyses, and how to obtain proper student-level effects when there are multiple schools, but not enough to support multilevel analyses. This study is based on a 4-year, six-measurement-point, follow-up of 1,008 adolescents (M age = 12.6 years, SD = 0.6 at Time 1.) The results show four latent classes presenting elevated, moderate, increasing, and low trajectories defined based on GSE levels and fluctuations. The results show that GSE becomes traitlike as it increases and that school life effects, moderated by gender, played an important role in predicting membership in these trajectories.