Ten statements, sixty years of use. The standard research measure of global self-worth.
10 questions across 1 scale, about 3 minutes|Published scoring key from Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (RSES), 10 items, not invented
Authors: Rosenberg, M. (1965), Society and the Adolescent Self-Image
Licence: Made available by the University of Maryland Department of Sociology for use without a fee; credit Rosenberg (1965).
Your overall sense of self-worth, measured as agreement with ten statements about how you regard yourself.
High. You hold a steady, positive view of yourself that survives bad days and criticism. You can acknowledge a failure without concluding something about your worth.
Low. Your sense of worth is conditional and moves with events. Criticism tends to confirm something you already suspected, and successes get discounted.
Question 1 of 10
How much do you agree?
I feel that I'm a person of worth, at least on an equal plane with others.
Morris Rosenberg built this scale in 1965 for a study of 5,024 high-school students in New York State, and published it in Society and the Adolescent Self-Image. It was designed as a Guttman scale and is now almost always scored as a Likert scale, which is how it is scored here.
Six decades later it remains the default measure of global self-esteem in the social sciences, for an unglamorous reason: ten items, four options, one number, and enough published use that a new result can be read against a large literature.
The scale is made available by the University of Maryland Department of Sociology for use without a fee. The items, their order and the reverse-scored set used here come from the scoring sheet they publish.
10 answers
Each answer you give is a number on the published response scale.
One scale
Answers belonging to the same scale are added together.
A band
Each total is read against the bands printed for that scale.
Each item scores 0-3. For items 1, 2, 4, 6 and 7, Strongly agree = 3 down to Strongly disagree = 0; items 3, 5, 8, 9 and 10 are reversed. The ten item scores are summed for a total from 0 to 30.
Scoring runs in your browser from your own answers. It is deterministic, so the same answers always produce the same result, and no part of it is generated, estimated or inferred.
The UMD page reports that test-retest correlations are typically in the range of .82 to .88, and Cronbach's alpha across various samples in the range of .77 to .88. For a ten-item scale that is strong.
Research has found both a single-factor and a two-factor structure, with self-confidence and self-deprecation behaving as partly separate things. That matters in practice: some people agree with the positive statements and the negative ones, and a single total can flatten that.
The one widely cited cut-off is 15. Scores below it are conventionally described as low self-esteem. It is a convention from the literature, not a clinical threshold, and no questionnaire score diagnoses anything.
Worth taking if
Not the right tool for
This is a self-assessment, not a clinical diagnosis. No questionnaire can diagnose anything, and this one was never designed to.
The items are obvious in their direction, which makes the scale easy to answer strategically, in either direction.
Self-esteem fluctuates. A single measurement reflects a period, not a fixed trait.
Norms depend heavily on the sample. The 15 cut-off is a convention, not a biological threshold.
This is a self-assessment questionnaire, not a diagnostic instrument and not medical advice.
10 questions, about 3 minutes. Your answers are scored on this device and stored on this device. There is no account to create and nothing is sent to a server. Progress saves as you go, so a long assessment can be finished across more than one sitting.
No sign up, ever. Every item in this assessment comes from Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (RSES), 10 items, and the page above tells you exactly how each score is worked out before you answer anything.
Each item scores 0-3. Items 1, 2, 4, 6 and 7 are scored Strongly agree = 3 down to Strongly disagree = 0; items 3, 5, 8, 9 and 10 are reversed. The ten scores are summed for a total from 0 to 30.
Most adults score between 15 and 25. Below 15 is the conventional marker for low self-esteem, and above 25 is high. Norms vary with the sample, so these bands describe the literature rather than a biological fact.
No. Low self-esteem and depression often occur together but are different things, and this scale measures neither diagnostically. If a low score matches how you have been feeling for a while, a psychologist is the right place to take it.
Under three minutes. Ten statements with four options each and no free text anywhere, which makes it one of the quickest validated instruments in use.
Yes. The University of Maryland Department of Sociology makes it available without a fee; Rosenberg (1965) should be credited.
Yes, and re-measuring after a few months is more informative than retaking it immediately. The items are transparent enough that a same-day retake mostly measures what you remember answering.
Item wording, item order and the reverse-scored set (3, 5, 8, 9, 10) taken from the scale sheet and scoring instructions published by UMD Sociology. Check the source.