The Piers-Harris Children's Self Concept Scale: An Evaluation of Its Use on an Australian Population. Institute of Family Studies Working Paper No. 6.

The paper presents data about applying the Piers-Harris Children's Self Concept Scale (CSCS) to an Australian population. Data were obtained from 402 randomly selected male and female, primary and secondary school students, representing all school systems (195 from Grades 3 and 4, 207 from Grades 10 and 11). Anaylsis conducted on the two age groups generally support CSCS use. The CSCS was reliable (in terms of internal consistency) for all the sub-scales (behavior, intellectual and school status, physical appearance and attributes, anxiety, popularity, and happiness and satisfaction). Some evidence in the form of parent ratings of children's characteristics exists for scale validity as well. Factor analysis of the sub-scale scores of primary school student responses indicated that the items clustered differently. Scale reliabilities for the six sub-scales were considerably lower than for the CSCS as a whole. Findings suggest that the CSCS may be more unidimensional than previously believed because (1) a screen test indicated that less than six factors exist in the data, (2) the six sub-scales were highly intercorrelated and produced a single factor solution when factor analysis was conducted, (3) most of the factors appeared to be contaminated by response set bias, and (4) a correlational analysis revealed that the six sub-scales had highly similar correlations with a number of similar variables. The paper recommends that analysis conducted with the CSCS be based primarily on the total scale score and that caution be exercised in the interpretation of sub-scale scores. (AS)