The secret perks of being a middle child: A study on the relationship of birth order and proactive behavior as moderated by gender, self-esteem and sibship size

• Main Authors: Ancheta, Rollen Joy A., Lim, Jb Mari T., Tan, Beatrice Sheena C.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2012
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_bachelors/11854
• Institution: De La Salle University

Birth order has commonly been recognized to be part of a person’s asset, primarily due to the fact that literature supports evidence of distinctive personalities present to one over the other. However, a single birth order position namely the middle-born position has been recorded to mostly take the modest quality of characteristics, hardly been regarded to obtain a competitive personality. What this study therefore intends to find out is to reveal how exactly each birth order position is differentiated based on their proactive behaviors and whether such distinction can be moderated by their self-esteem and gender. Pushing further to the potential of the study, the researchers also focused on the data of middle children, unveiling whether such behavior may actually be moderated by their sibship size. Three hundred randomly selected university students was ask to answer a pen and paper format questionnaire composed of randomly distributed items from the Scale of Proactive Behavior and the Rosenberg test of Self-esteem. Each student where asked to list down how many siblings do they have including themselves in order to verify their birth order within their sibhip. As predicted, birth order indeed has a significant relationship with proactive behavior as moderated by self-esteem. Although it was hypothesized that middle-borns have the highest level of proactive behavior, they came in second from the youngest down to the oldest with the lowest level of proactive behavior as determined by two constructs namely anticipatory and opportunity seeking behaviors. Also, although it was predicted that attaining high self-esteem would be a pre-requisite in attaining high proactive behavior, they came in second from the youngest down to the oldest with the lowest level of proactive behavior as determined by two construct namely anticipatory and opportunity seeking behaviors. Also, although it was predicted that attaining high self-esteem would be a pre-requisite in attaining high proactive behavior, the results showed that the middle-borns, the group who had the lowest self-esteem, was not the group with the lowest proactive behavior but instead, it was the firstborns who was proved to have the highest self-esteem. Furthermore, it was found that among middle-borns, sibship size has a significant relationship with proactive behavior. Middle-borns with lower sibship size can be associated with high proactive behavior than those with larger number of family members. The results showed different implications, including having high self-esteem may not exactly always be a pre-requisite of proactive behavior and the concept of human agency where the state of being a middle-born may not exactly undermine the power of an individual to be proactive.