The Relationship Between Junior School Students' Core Self-evaluations And Peer Relationships And The Implication

Core self-evaluation refers to the general evaluation towards ourselves even under the conditions that we know nothing about ourselves.It is also an evaluation of our own personalities.It deeply influences other specific evaluations of ourselves.Peer relationship is a type of interpersonal relationship between peers or people of similar psychological developmental phases.For middle school students,peer relationship becomes increasingly important.It is hypothesized that the quality of peer relationship may affect individual's core self-evaluation.Thus,the current study investigated the relationship between the two constructs.In this study,203 participants were middle school students recruited from a middle school in Urumqi,among whom 181 students produced usable data.The revised Chinese version of School Students' Peer Relationship Scales and Core Self-evaluation Scales were adopted to measure their peer relationship and core self-evaluation.Correlation analysis showed that the core self-evaluation of middle school students was positively correlated with their peer relationship.Further analysis showed that their core self-evaluation was significantly correlated with the three components of peer relationship(popularity,loneliness,and exclusion).Two-way ANOVA was employed to compare the gender and one-child difference of adolescents' peer relationship and core self-evaluation.For both peer relationship and core self-evaluation,no significant difference was found between genders and whether a student is one-child or not.In the end,I used multiple linear regression to predict core self-evaluation with the three components of peer relationship(popularity,loneliness,and exclusion).The results showed that all the components of peer relationship but exclusion could predict their peer relationship.The findings of the current study may have some clinical implications of group counseling,that is,promoting middle students' peer relationship,especially increasing their popularity and reducing their loneliness,could improve their core self-evaluation.