Reciprocal Relationships Between Perceived Teachers' Moral Grandstanding, Self-Esteem, and Rumination Among Chinese Primary School Students: An RI-CLPM Study.

Abstract

Moral grandstanding is the use of moral talk driven by egotistical motives to promote oneself or display moral superiority. Although moral grandstanding has been extensively examined in political and public health contexts, its relevance to educational settings remains understudied, especially in teacher-student interactions where teachers serve as moral authorities for children. The present research adapted the Perceived Teachers' Moral Grandstanding Scale and examined its longitudinal associations with students' socioemotional processes. In the first step, the Moral Grandstanding Motivation Scale was adapted to assess adolescents' perceptions of teachers' moral grandstanding in the Chinese cultural context. The validation sample consisted of 1,686 Chinese primary school students (M_age = 10.78 years, SD = 1.09; 43.59% male). In the second step, guided by Self-Discrepancy Theory, which suggests that distress can arise when individuals perceive a gap between how they see themselves and the standards they believe they should meet, a longitudinal study examined reciprocal associations among perceived teachers' moral grandstanding, self-esteem, and rumination. The longitudinal sample consisted of 811 Chinese adolescents (M_age = 9.93 years, SD = 0.98; 49.81% male) who completed a four-wave survey. Results indicated that the Perceived Teachers' Moral Grandstanding scale demonstrates good internal consistency, split-half reliability, structural validity, and discriminant validity relative to related constructs. In addition, the random intercept cross-lagged panel model revealed that perceived teachers' moral grandstanding and rumination were reciprocally predictive, with self-esteem serving as a mediator in this bidirectional relationship. The findings provide partial support for the view that students' perceptions of teachers' moral grandstanding, self-esteem, and rumination are linked through reciprocal processes over time. Understanding these links can help clarify how moralized teacher-student interactions are associated with students' socioemotional processes in school contexts.