A study of social anxiety of adolescents according to self-esteem and some personal and demographic characteristics

The aim of this study is to identify the level of social anxiety of adolescents, the relation between social anxiety and self-esteem and to analyse the answer to the question if differences in the level of social anxiety of adolescents are related to demographic factors such as perceived social-economic status, the education level of the parents and the (non)use of psychological counseling. This study has been conducted with the use of descriptive methodology and the participants in this research consist of a total of 385 students of the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd grades of the Public High Schools. The Aydın and Tekinsav Sütçü?s (2007) ?Social Anxiety Scale for Adolescents? (ESKÖ/SASA) adjusted to Turkish, the ?Self-Esteem Scale? developed by Akın (2007) and the ?Personal Information Form? as prepared by the researcher were used as data- gathering tools. As non-parametric methods the Mann-Whitney U, Kruskal-Wallis H and Kendall?s Tau B rank correlation methods were used in the analysis of the gathered data.According to the results of the conducted researchl social anxiety levels of adolescents have been found to be of medium level in general but the level of %13,5 of the participants have been found to be of high level. After investigation of the lower dimensions of social anxiety, adolescents have been found to experience social anxiety the most in new conditions in the first place, in the case of fear of negative avaluation in the second place and in the third place in common conditions. The self-esteem of the adolescent participants have been found high in general and only %3,4 of them scored low on the self-esteem scale. A low meaningful negative relation has been found between the social anxiety scales and the self-esteem scales of adolescents. Furthermore according to the aspects of personal and demographic characteristics, gender, social status, education level of the mother and perceived socio-economic level no significant differences have been observed in the social anxiety scale. On the other hand significant differences have been found in the social anxiety scales of adolescents related to the education level of the father. It has been found that the social anxiety scale of adolescents whose fathers are only graduates of the first level of Primary School are higher than adolescents whose fathers are graduates of the second level of Primary School.Key Terms: Anxiety, Social Anxiety, Self Confidence, Adolescents