An interview
We recently talked with Liman, whose article titled, “Self‐esteem Among Chinese Cohorts: Its Temporal Trend and Its Relationships with Socioecological Factors, 1993–2016”, recently appeared in the March/April 2020 issue of EJP. Liman is assistant professor at the Department of Psychology at the Education University of Hong Kong.
Read on to learn more about Liman’s work on self-esteem!
Q: Hello Liman! Can you tell us a bit about yourself and how you became involved in personality psychology?
I’m Liman from the Education University of Hong Kong. Since high school, I started wondering why some people showed a great change in personality while some did not after spending seven years in the same environment. Majoring in psychology in my undergraduate study provided me some important directions to address my questions from a socio-cultural psychological perspective. During my master’s study and PhD study, I was particularly interested in investigating how external factors, including socioeconomic factors and cultural values, would shape individuals’ life satisfaction, indecisive tendencies, and resource allocation. Continuing my research journey, my current research projects examine well-being, social relationships, and decision making from cultural and socio-ecological perspectives.
Q: What do you like to do in your free time?
It’s hard but I usually try to keep a separation between my work and my personal life after I leave the office. Thus, I often do some activities that are completely unrelated to my research work in order to “relax” my mind. Having a walk after dinner or hiking during the weekends would be a great option in my free time. From where I live in Hong Kong, it is just a few minute walk to the hills.
Q: How did you decide to study self-esteem in different Chinese cohorts?
Self-esteem has been one of the most frequently examined constructs in different areas of psychology due to its substantial and extensive impact. The temporal patterns of self-esteem in different places, such as the United States and Australia, have been examined in previous work. Interestingly, taking all relevant findings together, we found great variations in the temporal pattern of self-esteem across societies. Chinese have been experiencing rapid economic development that brought dramatic changes in their living in the past decades, which makes China to be a special place for studying the influence of socioecological factors on human psychological functioning. Inspired by some studies suggesting that the influence of socioecological factors may be more salient for some cohorts, we thought it would be interesting to explore whether the temporal pattern of self-esteem varied among different Chinese cohorts and whether the relation between socioecological factors and self-esteem varied among different Chinese cohorts.
Q: Can you tell me about the study? (i.e., what was the design, what were the findings, what are some of the implications)
To examine the temporal trend of self-esteem among different Chinese cohorts, we conducted cross-temporal meta-analyses. We analyzed the patterns of the sample mean of self-esteem among secondary school students, college students, and community participants collected between 1993 and 2016 from over 600 published articles. We also explored the relations between different socioecological factors (e.g., GDP per capita, urbanization population ratio, and divorce rate) and self-esteem scores among different Chinese groups. The results showed some unique patterns of self-esteem among secondary school students. When focusing on the data of college students and community participants, we found a significant linear trend for an increase in self-esteem and supportive evidence for the relation between socioecological factors (except unemployment rate) and self-esteem. In contrast, we did not find a significant linear trend for self-esteem over time and we found little evidence for the relation between socioecological factors and self-esteem when focusing on the data of secondary school students. These findings highlight the importance of both socioecological characteristics and heritage culture (e.g., values, beliefs, and practices shared among members in a culture) in shaping the level of self-esteem over time. In addition, the present study also suggests that we need to take age effects into account for a better understanding of the ecology-personality characteristic relationship.
Q: Can you formulate some tips or advice for young scholars in the field of personality psychology?
As a young scholar in the field, I am still searching for good strategies for survival. One advice I obtained from some well-established researchers is to broaden the scope of our knowledge and research interests. Knowing more different fields does not only equip us with multiple methodological approaches to address the same issues but also creates possibilities for us to address some important but yet unanswered questions that require collaborations among multidisciplinary fields.
Another important skill for survival is good time management, which is not easily achieved. When we are in the PhD study, we can spend all of our time on conducting research. As new faculty members, we need to learn many new tasks related to not only research but also teaching, and administration. How to manage to complete all different tasks efficiently is definitely one of great challenges for young scholars.