The Impact of Experienced Societal Discrimination on Muslim Self-Esteem/ Self-Perception In American Society

The aim of this study was to understand the impact of societal discrimination on Muslim-Americans\u27 self-esteem and self-perception levels. It was hypothesized that self-esteem levels would appear to be lower in Muslim-Americans as compared to a control group. In this experiment, 85 Muslim-Americans were gathered to take a survey that consisted of a modified version of the Rosenburg self-esteem scale. The control group consisted of 80 Caucasian participants, who took a similar survey in order to compare the levels of self-esteem between the two different ethnic groups. The results of the first part of the p-values of each question were less than α=0.05 revealing that both groups equally experienced discrimination in society. The Rosenburg self-esteem evaluation showed that the t-values for the majority of the questions on the scale were above the critical value of 1.97. These results show that Muslim-Americans have statistically significant lower self-esteem levels, as compared to the American majority, as a result of experienced societal discrimination. This supports the original hypothesis posed by this experiment. It can be concluded that discrimination correlates to the self-esteem of ethnic minority groups in America