Project Three - Self-esteem

Within our day to day lives there numerous reasons that impact the way we think about ourselves. This can be our social acceptance around peers, our physical self-appearance or even relationships with family. Self-esteem is the value a person makes of their own personal self-worth. Olsen (2008) highlights that the key point of self-esteem is that it concerns people as individuals and our own personal sense of value and the development this stems from the experiences in person’s life both positive and negative. Self-esteem differs for a number of individuals it has a powerful effect on human cognition, motivation, emotion and behaviour (Cambell & Lavallee, 1993). Self-concept is known as the individual's belief about himself or herself, including the person's attributes and who and what the self is Baumeister (1999).

From working in the outdoors I have been able to see first-hand that adventure experiences can have positive and negative effects on a client or students self-esteem and i felt this was due to how they felt about their own physical self-concept. The domain of physical self-concept refers to all the views a person holds concerning the physical part of him or her self (Fox & Corbin, 1989). Marsh et al. (1994) hierarchical model shows the relationship with self esteem and physical self-concept. Self-esteem is placed at the top with global physical self-concept in the middle and the more specific components relating to physical self-concepts at the base of the model. 

Figure 1: Hierarchical model showing the relationship among self-esteem, global physical self-concept and specific components directly relating to self-concept  Figure 1: Hierarchical model showing the relationship among self-esteem, global physical self-concept and specific components directly relating to self-concept  The demands of adventure activities forces participants to test the components of physical self concept as adventure activities do push ones sport competence, strength and endurance etc. For instance take climbing. To successfully succeed in climbing you would  need to be flexible enough, strong enough and have the right coordination to complete the climb. Gehris, Kress & Swalm (2010) study found that students with in adventure education showed a number of implications with in adventure activates that did in fact impact students self esteem due to a lack of global physical self-concept. One example from the study was a student felt that being overweight in fact hampered her ability to perform simple climbing tasks which made it difficult to succeed and ultimately lead to embarrassment in front of peers. Experiences such as these happened numerous times whilst working on placement year for example clients having to get extra large wet-suits due to being overweight or participants being overweight and physically not being able to do a walk. These are both components relating to physical self concept. I found that decrease in physical ability or how they felt about their appearance would then lower their  physical self-concept to then overall have a negative effect on their self-esteem. This would then have a knock on affect for the remainder of their time in the activity. I myself as a facilitator would tackle this problem by making them succeed in an activity they physically didn't perceive they could do. I think it is vital that as an instructor or facilitator we must create a setting or situation that the outcome of the activity will be positive by setting achievable goals.

References: 

Baumeister, R. F. (Ed.) (1999). The self in social psychology. Philadelphia, PA: Psychology Press (Taylor & Francis).

Campbell, J. D., & Lavallee, L. F. (1993). Who am I? The role of self-concept confusion in understanding the behavior of people with low self-esteem. In Self-esteem (pp. 3-20). Springer US.

Fox, K.R., & Corbin, C.B. (1989). The Physical Self-Perception Profile: Development and preliminary evaluation. Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology, 11, 408–430.

Gehris, J., Kress, J., & Swalm, R. (2010). Students’ views on physical development and physical self-concept in adventure-physical education. Journal of Teaching in Physical Education, 29(2), 146-166.

Marsh, H.W., Richards, G.E., Johnson, S., Roche, L., & Tremayne, P. (1994). Physical Self-Description Questionnaire: Psychometric properties and a multitrait-multimethod analysis of relations to existing instruments. Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology, 16,270-305.

O’Connell, T. S. (2001). Self-concept: A study of outdoor adventure education with ado- lescents. Dissertations Abstracts International, 62 

Olsen, J.M., Breckler, S.J., &Wiggins, E.C. (2008). Social Psychology Alive (1st ed.) Canada: Nelson.