How children and young people see themselves: new study explores the factors that matter

Background to the study: The perceptions that people have of themselves affect all areas of their lives and influence every decision they make. It is therefore vital for children and young people to seek to view themselves positively; if they achieve this aim, they can expect a boost to their personal and social wellbeing, their academic attainment, and their long-term development as people. Considering the ideas young people hold of themselves – their responses to the question ‘who am I?’ – is a crucial part of understanding their behaviors, decisions and interactions. In view of the significance that attaches to self-perceptions and self-awareness in the contexts of young people’s lives, those adults with an influence on these contexts, including parents, teachers, and educational planners, can help create positive learning environments by being aware of the factors linked to the self-perceptions of learners in school and the extent of the influence each factor exerts.

Kiel, 05.11.2024. A new, comprehensive meta-study conducted by the Leibniz Institute for Science and Mathematics Education (IPN) in Kiel has provided a systematic overview of meta-analyses about childrens and adolescence self-perceptions, as well as illuminating the aspects of children’s and teens’ lifeworlds that are most closely intertwined with their views of themselves. Two of the IPN’s junior research group leads, Thorben Jansen and Jennifer Meyer, worked on the study, that draws on data from over 16 million school students collected in more than 8,500 primary research studies, alongside John Hattie of the University of Melbourne and Jens Möller of Kiel University. “We wanted to try and understand which factors feed into children’s young people’s views and conceptions of themselves; to do this, we reviewed summaries of the existing literature on this subject and brought all this work together so we could gain a comprehensive overview of the relevant data,” Jennifer Meyer explains.

Detailing the researchers’ findings, Thorben Jansen notes: “Our results show that, for young people, their perceptions of their performance at school, their emotions, their motivation and the support they feel they have from people around them have close associations with their holding a positive view of themselves.” Jennifer Meyer adds: “We found that interventions drawing on theories of motivation, that engage self-perceptions directly, proved particularly effective in helping young people take a positive view of themselves, in comparison to more general interventions targeting improvements in academic performance or the school climate, for instance.”

Literature reviews do not permit the identification of causal mechanisms at work in the emergence of young people’s self-concepts. This study’s findings on self-perception are therefore neither definitive nor conclusive, and caution is correspondingly warranted when interpreting them. The study’s purpose is to open up the rich and detailed research landscape on self-perceptions for the use of other, related disciplines that conduct reaearch with children and young people. Further, practitioners and others with an influence on children’s and teenagers’ lifeworlds can engage with the study to gain an overview of the various factors linked to young people’s self-concepts and to create interventions with the specific aim of boosting a positive self-image among members of this group.

The full text of the study is available on an open-access basis at https://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2025-40542-002.html.