Centre for Confidence and Well-being, Flourishing Lives, Projects , Confidence

The Centre's empirical research

In the first six years of its existence the Centre was keen to measure the confidence and related attributes of young people in Scotland. Confidence is not a term psychologists use as it is multi-faceted and so not easily measured. On the advice of Dr Elaine Duncan, a psychologist from Glasgow Caledonian University, who was acting as an adviser to the Centre at that time we took four instruments and put them on-line and encouraged various projects to use them. We called this our Confidence Research System (CRS). The four measures were on self-esteem, optimism, happiness and life-satisfaction. We then added mindset and self-efficacy. More information can be found by using the menu on the right.

In 2011 as a result of budget cuts we had to stop using the CRS and collecting data. You can access various papers analysing our results below.

Paper 1 was written in 2009 by Diane Wernisch who was working at the Centre as an intern. In this paper Diane gives an overview of the data the Centre collected via the CRS and the headline results.

Paper 2 was written by Diane Wernisch and analyses the results in much more detail.

Papter 3 was written by Diane Wernisch and analyses the results by gender.

Paper 4 was written by Diane Wernisch and compares the results for 17/18 year old school pupils and university students.

Paper 5 was written by Professor Nicholas Emler in 2007 on the data we had collected at this point on self-esteem. At this stage we were not able to analyse the data by socio-economic status.