Abstract

With the development of personality theories, the concept of self has been studied in many angles. On the contrary, due to this reason, a tot of terms and definitions related to the self have appear­ed and the direction of study for the self has been also ambiguous. And then many of the current self-esteem studies have concentrated on definition and measurement rather than self-esteem itself. There are three big issues discussed about the concept of self; that is, problems about the use of 1)the term, self-esteem or self-concept and 2) the multi-or unidimensionality, and 3)the stability or instability of the self. Among many self-prefixed terms, self-concept and self-esteem are most popular, but the use of self-esteem is more desirable than that of self-concept because all descriptions of the self involve some emotional loading. Self-esteem is recently redefined by ShaveIson(1976) who suggests the hierarchical facet model of self-esteem. After that time, the trend of study for self-esteem is moving from unidimensionality to multidimensionality. In light of multidimensionality, the instability of self-esteem can be easily received. Furthermore, the argument that each dimension of self-esteem should be weighted according to the degree of its importance is more and more dominant. For this reason, it seems reasonable to accept that general self-esteem can exist as the sum of each dimension weighted rather than as one among several dimensions or a uni-dimension.