Question 18

Where do We Go from Here?
What are the Most Pressing Issues Facing Researchers, Practitioners, Teachers, and Parents?

The essays in this section focus on the most pressing issues facing researchers, parents, teachers, and therapists. The authors who contributed to this section have widely varied backgrounds—Leary is a social/personality psychologist, Harter is a developmental psychologist, and Branden is a clinical psychologist—although each has focused extensively on self-esteem issues.

Leary focuses his comments primarily on the important issues facing researchers. He emphasizes the need for self-esteem researchers and practitioners to achieve a broader consensus on how precisely to conceptualize self-esteem and, until such time arrives, for them to be very explicit about their conceptualization. Moreover, Leary emphasizes how important it is that researchers ensure that the measures they use to assess self-esteem mirror their conceptualization. Another important challenge facing researchers, Leary asserts, is to go beyond simple lay explanations of the role of self-esteem and provide more complex and cogent theoretical explanations.

Harter raises issues pertinent to researchers, teachers, practitioners, and parents. Many of her comments for researchers emphasize developmental issues. Harter also writes that it is especially important to foster greater cross talk between developmental psychologists who study mainly children and social/personality psychologists who study mainly adults. For practitioners, Harter focuses on issues facing those who want to create interventions to promote higher and healthier self-esteem. One issue that Harter raises for teachers is the importance of identifying those children with violent or suicidal ideation who do not have histories of conduct disorders. Finally, Harter offers several important suggestions for parents.

Branden raises several major issues facing researchers that converge with those raised by Leary and Harter—agreeing on the definition of self-esteem, improving on the self-reported assessment of self-esteem, and operationalizing self-esteem in a way that allows for the real-life identification of those with healthy and unhealthy self-esteem. In addition, Branden emphasizes the need for better understanding of the behaviors of parents, teachers, and clinicians that can foster healthier self-esteem in children and in clients with self-esteem difficulties.