The present study investigated whether area of residence, age group and sex explain difterences in the self-esteem of boys and girls. The sample consisted of 1033 students of both sexes (444 boys 547 girls) were grouped into two residential area groups village (N=460) with 241 girls and 219 boys and city (N=573) with 306 girls and 267 boys. The Rosenberg self-esteem scale was used following the author's initial recommendation to treat it as a Guttman scale The Chi-square demonstrated that there was significant differences between the ages and sex. Residents in the urban areas presented higher levels of self-esteem than rural residents Boys seem to present more uniform levels of self-esteem than girls among whom the greater discrepancies were found in the group living in the rural areas.
self-esteem; rural; urban
