Culture and gender differences in the self-esteem of college students: A four-country comparison

The responses of 268 Hong Kong and 399 Nigerian first or second year social science undergraduate university students to the Personal and Academic Self-Concept Inventory were compared to previously reported findings with similar groups of American and Nepalese students. Country x Gender analyses indicated clear, statistically significant main and interaction effects which varied according to the area of self-esteem under investigation. Support was found for the tendency found in research with secondary school students for subjects from non-Western cultures to report higher academic but lower non-academic self-esteem than their Western peers. However, the gender differences did not generalize across cultures.