One of the key features of the Child Of Our Time websites is the survey, where you're given a chance to participate in an academic study. David Messer reports back on what we've learned from the Our Family survey which accompanied the 2006 series.

For most of us, feeling good about ourselves, feeling optimistic for the future and feeling that we are in control of our lives are things that we value. But often we don’t feel like this; we may feel depressed, anxious and that we are being affected by things outside ourselves. These feelings are important, and they probably affect other aspects of our lives too, such as our relationships.

Although these feelings may change from day to day, there is also some stability to them and different people tend, consistently, to feel differently about these areas. However, although there is consistency in these feelings they can be affected by life experiences and people’s characteristics. For example, these feelings might change with our age. Do children get less positive as they get older? Is middle age a low point or a high one? In addition, are there issues about male-female differences? Do males tend to more positive feelings in these areas than females?

The Child of Our Time survey set out to gather data from large numbers of people to try to find some answers to these questions. So far, more than 17,000 people have completed the survey, and this makes it one of the biggest studies in this area so far. It’s certainly the biggest in Europe. As far as we know, the only larger study of self-esteem was a massive one of 300,000 people in America. That study looked at how self-esteem varied with age and found that it was relatively high during childhood, declined during adolescence, rose again through adulthood, but started to go down again after 65 years of age.

But other, much smaller, studies of self-esteem changes over the life-span have found different results - some of them finding quite the opposite to the big American study.

The Child of Our Time study is the first large-scale piece of research that looks at all three factors, self-esteem, optimism and locus of control, across the life-span and comparing males with females.

Methods

In 2006 we set up a web-based survey on Open2.net, linked to the BBC Parenting Child of Our Time website. The survey asked people to fill in questionnaires about self-esteem, optimism and locus of control. We based the survey on questionnaires that had been used in a lot of other research, so that we can be confident in their reliability and accuracy. In fact, we have so much data that we can also confirm how well these questionnaires measure the three factors.

We took out data that was contradictory or otherwise invalid. For example, we removed the data from the person who claimed to be a 5-year-old grandfather! This left us with results from 16,835 participants. 85% were over 16 years old, 58% of them were mothers and 11% were fathers.

Findings

Because we had answers from 8-year-olds to 80 year-olds we needed to look at age bands rather than individual ages. The age bands covered two year periods (for example, 8 and 9 years), up until 21 years of age, to give us plenty of information about this period in life when feelings are likely to be more changeable; and after 21 years the age bands covered four years (for example, 22-25 years).

Most of the questions were answered by indicating strong agreement, agreement, disagreement or strong disagreement with statements about self-esteem, optimism or locus of control. So we had peoples' answers on four point scales.

Self-esteem and optimism: Age and gender differences

Everyone answered the same self-esteem and optimism questions. The average rating of self-esteem and optimism for each of the age bands is given below. These scores are higher than the middle ratings of the scales (1.5) and this shows that in general people reported that they thought well of themselves and were optimistic.

The scores for self-esteem and optimism show very similar peaks and troughs across the age span. These data show that the ages at which people feel best about themselves and are most optimistic are in middle adulthood. In contrast, the people who felt worst about themselves and least optimistic about the future were young people.

We used statistics to check this, to see whether the differences are bigger than those we might expect if they are just random variations. The self-esteem of people in the 34-37 age bands turned out to be significantly higher than in the age bands of 10-29 and 50-53. Similarly, the optimism of people in the 34-49 age bands was significantly higher than in the age bands of 10-29. This means the differences can be considered to be reliable, but it also is worth pointing out that the absolute size of the difference is not large, so we are dealing with subtle rather than dramatic differences between the ages.

We also wanted to see if there were differences between males and females. Overall, males had higher scores of self-esteem and optimism than females, and these differences were most marked up to 40 years. This difference was statistically significant, although it wasn’t large. The thing is, with such large numbers of participants, even small differences can be statistically significant. This means we can be confident that another study such as this would also find a similar difference between males and females. But, we also need to recognise that many males have scores below those of females. In terms of optimism there was no significant difference between males and females.

Self-worth in relation to motherhood

Because the sample included a lot of women aged between 16 and 34 years, we decided to compare mothers and non-mothers in this age-range. The findings are shown in these graphs:

Both graphs tell a similar story.

If we look at mothers (the green lines) we can see that self esteem and optimism tend to be low at younger ages, but higher in older mothers.

In contrast, for non-mothers then both self-esteem and optimism show a gradual increase with age, except that both show a drop in the 30-33 age band.

Summary

We’d like to stress that these findings are preliminary. Along with more detailed descriptions of our methods, they need to be read and checked by other psychologists, before we can be sure that our results are accepted as well established.

Given this word of caution, it is worth picking out what look to be the most significant findings. These are:

1. People in middle adulthood, in their 30s and 40s, have the highest levels of self-esteem and optimism. Young people below 21 years tend to have the lowest levels.
2. Up to the age of about 40, males tend to have higher self esteem than females.
3. Younger mothers tend to have lower self-esteem and optimism than those who are older.
4. The self-esteem and confidence of non-mothers above 30 returns to the levels of 16-17-year-olds.

We suspect that you, like us, can think of a lot of reasons for these findings. We are going to continue to analyse the information that people have supplied and will be putting more results on this site as they become available.

Lastly, a very big thank you if you were one of the people who answered the questionnaires.