Momentary self-views as composed of self-esteem, self-concept clarity, and self-efficacy: Development of a 6-item scale

An individual’s view of themselves is multifaceted; they may have affective views (e.g., “I like who I am”), views about their behavioural competencies (e.g., “I am able to complete tasks given to me”), and cognitive views or self-knowledge (e.g., “I have a clear sense of who I am”). In psychological literature, these three facets of self-views have traditionally been separately studied as self-esteem, self-efficacy, and self-concept clarity. Existing empirical work has suggested that these three constructs are intercorrelated, while still having distinct associations with other constructs such as life satisfaction, motivation, and social outcomes (e.g., DeMarree & Bobrowski, 2017; Lamont et al., 2019). Thus, the current work proposes that the three constructs form related but distinct facets of overarching self-views, or the beliefs that an individual holds about themselves. This framework would be beneficial to both theory and practice; researchers benefit from distilling and untangling the relationships between the three self-view facets and other outcomes in order to reveal more accurate and nuanced patterns, while practitioners benefit from knowing which facet(s) would be the best targets for training and intervention in clinical and organisational settings. The aim of the current work was thus to develop a short self-views measure that captures the three constituent facets, building upon existing established measures of self- esteem, self-concept clarity, and self-efficacy. Invariance of the proposed measure across sexes was also tested to confirm that the measure would hold consistent across both male and female respondents. As an exploratory extension, males and females were compared in terms of the three facets themselves to examine if mean levels of the three facets or patterns of associations between the three facets would vary by sex.