The aim of this chapter is to paint a collective portrait of the low self-esteem person. Our cumulative portrait draws on data from a number of survey and experimental studies that have included self-esteem as a critical or implicated variable. Although this approach differs from the familiar case study method, a great deal can be learned about the low self-esteem phenomenon by searching for general findings that appear across a broad range of cases. It is for this reason that we speak of a collective not an individual, portrait of people with low self-esteem (hereafter LSE).

We utilize several data sources to paint our portrait, with particular focus on three large-scale studies of adolescents: (1) a study of 5,024 high school juniors and seniors in New York State (hereafter NYSS), (2) a study of 815 students from grades 7 to 12 in the Baltimore public schools (hereafter BCS), and (3) a study of 2,300 tenth grade pupils in eighty-seven high schools throughout the contiguous forty-eight states (the Youth in Transition Study, hereafter YIT). These data are supplemented by other published findings, especially from adult populations.

Our sketch has two major components: (1) a discussion of LSE and high self-esteem self-concepts (self-esteem, it must be stressed, is only one feature of the self-concept), and (2) consideration of LSE peoples' emotional and cognitive dispositions. Concerning the first component, the self-concept is a much broader entity than self-esteem: It is the totality of the individua's thoughts and feelings about the self.