relationship between first name and self-esteem in students of Islamic Azad ‎University, Branch of Hamadan ‎

Self-esteem is considered the evaluative component of the self-concept and the first name is a part of individual self with tremendous effect on his identity. The major purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between first name and global self-esteem with respect of sex differences in university students. The survey method was used. The sample size of the study consisted 400 Azad university students of Hamadan Branch who were selected through stratified random sampling according to their gender، academic level and field of study in academic year 2011-2012. The instrument was Coopersmith questionnaire with 58 close-ended responses. The findings were analyzed through ANOVA، one way and two way between groups analysis، t-test for independent groups، Levens’ Test of homogeneity of variance and Tukeys’ Post Hoc. The results revealed that global self-esteem average score of university students was 31. 91±6. 91 with no sex differences (P=0. 747); but the kind of first name was highly related to global self-esteem (P=0. 013) regardless of students gender، and the self-esteem of students with Islamic names was the highest and Iranian and western names were in order. Self-esteem of university students was correlated with their first names regardless of their gender and with respect of our culture students with Islamic names had best self-esteem scores and western had worse.