Self-concept and anxiety among Indonesian, American, Indian, and Chinese college students : a cross-cultural study

The study investigated the influence of culture and sex, and their interaction, on measured self-concept and anxiety. Four cultural groups: Indonesian, American, Indian, and Chinese were studied. The variables of interest were five aspects of self-concept (self-esteem, net conflict, total conflict, deviancy, and variability) and two types of anxiety (general anxiety and- test anxiety).The instruments employed were the Tennessee Self Concept Scale, the IPAT Anxiety Scale questionnaire, the Suinn Test Anxiety Behavior Scale, and the House-Tree-Person Test. The Ss were 240 randomly selected undergraduate college students and there were 37 females and 2.3 males from each of the four cultural groups. Multivariate analysis of variance was used to test the three major hypotheses.There were systematic differences between cultures on both self-concept and anxiety and it was concluded that these differences were attributable to the differential effect of the cultures on the subjects. There were no differences between the sexes on the seven variables. There was a significant interaction between culture and sex on five of the seven variables.Three areas of additional research were recommended. Two of these involved extentions of the basic research model while the other dealt with the development of cultural stable measuring instruments.Thesis (Ed. S.