The Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale in one page: 10 items, how to score them and which are reversed, its structure, reliability and public-domain license.
Ten items for a single global score of self-esteem, in international use for more than five decades. Now in the public domain, with a Spanish validation in university students.
By Víctor Ciudad-Fernández, PhD · Updated: October 6, 2026 · Leer esta ficha en español · Instruments
The Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale measures global self-esteem: a person’s overall evaluation of their own worth, without breaking it down into domains such as academic, physical or social self-esteem. Since Morris Rosenberg published it in 1965, it has been widely used to measure global self-esteem in social, clinical and personality psychology.
Rosenberg developed it with 5,024 high school juniors and seniors from ten randomly selected schools in New York State. Since then it has been used with adolescents and adults in many countries and languages, as an outcome (self-esteem as an indicator of psychological well-being), as a predictor (vulnerability to stress, depression or risk behaviors) and as a control variable.
A psychometric finding worth knowing before you interpret results: in many samples, a single factor fits well only if the positively worded items are allowed to share extra variance with each other (and the negatively worded ones likewise). A common reading is a method effect linked to item wording, not two different kinds of self-esteem, which is why you will read about “two-factor” solutions that do not call the total score into question.
The ten items are answered on a four-point scale from strongly agree to strongly disagree. Rosenberg designed it as a Guttman scale, but it is now commonly scored as a Likert scale. Following the University of Maryland page, positively worded items are scored strongly agree = 3 to strongly disagree = 0, and items 3, 5, 8, 9 and 10 are reversed; the total runs from 0 to 30, with higher scores meaning higher self-esteem.
Other scoring options are acceptable: scoring 1 to 4 gives a 10 to 40 range, and some researchers use five- or seven-point formats. Say which one you used, because the ranges and norms are not interchangeable. Do not print the reversal marks on the respondents’ sheet.
Studies have supported both a one-factor structure and a two-factor structure (self-confidence and self-deprecation). The Spanish validation compared several models with confirmatory factor analysis and found the best fit, in the whole sample and in men and women separately, for one general self-esteem factor with method effects associated with the positively worded items.
The practical recommendation is to keep using the total score of the ten items rather than two separate subscores, and to model the wording method effect if you run a confirmatory factor analysis.
Martín-Albo, Núñez, Navarro and Grijalvo (2007) translated the scale into Spanish and validated it with 420 university students. The one-factor model with method effects for the positively worded items fit best, internal consistency and four-week temporal stability were satisfactory, self-esteem correlated highly with the five dimensions of self-concept, and the authors support its use to assess self-esteem in higher education.
License: Public domain. The University of Maryland Department of Sociology, where Morris Rosenberg taught, states that the scale may be used without charge and without notifying the department, and that this extends to translations and adaptations, consistent with traditional scholarly attribution.
The department’s page includes the scale, its instructions and scoring, and key references. It also notes that the department cannot answer individual queries about the scale; its reference list usually answers most questions.
Cite Rosenberg’s book (the source of the scale) and the language version you use:
@book{rosenberg1965society,
author = {Rosenberg, Morris},
title = {Society and the adolescent self-image},
publisher = {Princeton University Press},
address = {Princeton, NJ},
year = {1965}
}The wording method effect is more than a curiosity: if you use the Rosenberg in a new population —a clinical sample, another age range, another language— check in your own data whether the negatively worded items behave like the rest before summing them. The item analysis calculator computes each item’s difficulty, discrimination and alpha-if-item-deleted, with a table ready for your manuscript’s appendix.
Both are valid: 0 to 3 per item gives 0-30 and 1 to 4 gives 10-40. What matters is to state which one you used and to compare only with norms built on the same scoring.
No. The University of Maryland states that the scale is in the public domain and that translations and adaptations are allowed with the usual scholarly attribution.
This fact sheet is an academic reference for information purposes: it does not reproduce any questionnaire item. Using the instrument in your research or practice may require citing its authors or asking for permission: see “How to get the instrument”.