Black-White Differences in Self-Esteem: Are They Affected by Response Styles?

Blacks are more likely than whites to use the extreme response categories in Likert-type questionnaire items. This general tendency has important implications for black-white comparisons along self-esteem dimensions. Analyses of several large-scale nationally representative surveys of high school students reveal that (1) blacks score significantly higher than whites when the full-scale range is used in computing self-esteem scores, but (2) the black-white discrepancy disappears when a truncated scoring method is employed to control differences in the use of extreme response categories.