Moderating effects of gender and age on the relationship between self-esteem and life satisfaction in mainland Chinese

Previous studies indicated that not only individual self-esteem (e. g., Diener Diener, 1995; Neto, 1993) but also collective self-esteem (e. g., Crocker, Luhtanen, Blaine, Broadnax, 1994; Zhang & Leung, 1999) contributed to prediction of life satisfaction. When the effects of individual and collective self-esteems on life satisfaction have been demonstrated, a further question in life satisfaction research is that whether the relationship between self-esteem and life satisfaction is subject to the influence of boundary conditions. The present investigation focused on moderating effects of gender and age on the relationship between self-esteem and life satisfaction in Chinese people. Participants were 1347 Mainland Chinese (aged from 14 to 88 years, 52.3% female) from three generations. They finished the General Life Satisfaction Scale (Leung & Leung, 1992), Life Domain Satisfaction Scale (revised from Michalos, 1985), Self-Esteem Scale (Rosenberg, 1965) and Collective Self-Esteem Scale (Luhtanen & Crocker, 1992). Hierarchical regression analysis indicated that the relationship between collective self-esteem on life domain satisfaction was stronger in the older people than in the younger people. However the effect of collective self-esteem on life domain satisfaction was stronger in the younger people than in the older people. These results might reflect life task differences and social expectation differences between male and female, younger and older people. Additional research is needed with other types of samples, especially with samples from some individualist cultures to see whether the results could generalize to these cultures.