ABSTRACT
Social interaction anxiety become one of the main obstacles of female undergraduate students in social interaction. This study aimed to determine correlation between self- esteem and social interaction anxiety among female undergraduate students in Indonesia. This study involved 357 female undergraduate students, between the age range of 17-23 years. The sampling of this study was purposive sampling. The duration of this study were two weeks. Measurement of this study was done by using Rosenberg’s Self-esteem Scale (Rosenberg,1965) consist of 10 items, 5 favourable items and 5 unfavourable items, with two aspects, there are self-acceptance and self-respect. While Social Interaction Anxiety was measured by Social Interaction Anxiety Scale (Mattick and Clarke,1998) with 20 items, 17 favourable items and 3 unfavourable items, used by likert scale that have been adaptation in five alternative answer (agree to strongly disagree). This scale was unidimensional scale. Spearman correlation used to analysis the data. Result indicated that there is negative correlation between self-esteem and social interaction anxiety among female undergraduate students, with r=-0.508; p=0.000. The relationship between the two variables showed that the lower self-esteem by female undergraduate students in Indonesia, have higher social interaction anxiety. When female undergraduate students have lower self-esteem, they tend to reduce their social interaction because they have anxiety to rejected from the environment. Based on these result, it can be said that the hypothesis is accepted. Further explanation will be discussed in the following study.
KEYWORDS
Self-esteem, social interaction anxiety, female undergraduate students