In order to study the relationship between self-esteem and communication anxiety, 1202 college students in a basic communication course completed scales developed to measure the two variables. To make sure that the variables were independent and that one was not a subset of the other, a factor analysis of all the items in each scale was performed. This analysis indicated that self-esteem and communication anxiety are conceptually distinct. Further analysis devised to describe relationships between sets of variables indicated that the combination of the two scales produced complex interactions. It was concluded that, while the inverse relation between self-esteem and communication anxiety occurred in a majority of the cases studied, a substantial number of persons in the study did not fit such a pattern and the relationship of self-esteem and communication anxiety is much more subtle and more complex than previously supposed. Tables of the factor analyses performed illustrate the text. (RL)