Schwartz’ human values framework is well established in the social sciences, but the area is still vibrant. Important novel streams of research are value heterogeneity within and between groups, emphasis on individuals’ value profiles instead of single values, and changes in values over time. With his 21-item instrument, Schwartz’ human values have been in the European Social Survey (ESS) across over 30 countries in all rounds from 2002 onwards. Lately, the values have also been included in the ESS-based surveys in Australia and South Africa.
The values in the ESS have given us not only insight into the values of individuals but also in how human values shape attitudes and behaviors. The ESS values data have been used in studies focusing on into peoples’ well-being, attitudes towards the environment, attitudes towards immigrants, political choice, entrepreneurship, and gender attitudes to name a few. In addition to studies on the impact of values on societal issues, researchers have also studied the values structure itself. Topics included amongst others the structure of human values across countries and studies assessing measurement invariance of the human values in the ESS across countries.
Research on values is still vibrant. Methodological topics are still in development as, e.g., the issue of measurement invariance is not fully resolved. Moreover, academics and also policy makers are more and more interested in peoples’ values and in particular in how they differ across groups within and across societies.
Recent research is social psychology has shown that despite being quite stable values still change over time and in particular in younger age groups. Values were found to change till about 30 years of age and then stabilise. As the ESS includes many waves and covers a 20-year period this provides opportunities not only to assess change between birth cohorts, but also allows us to assess this change across groups that are more than 20 years apart.
In the symposium we are open to many contributions related to changes in Schwartz’ human values over time and these can be either substantive or methodological.
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The stability of Human values and exploration of overall value means in the European social survey over time and across countries
Johannes Alfons Karl2, Ronald Fischer1
1D'OR Institute for Research and Education, Brazil; 2Dublin City University, Ireland
Our paper addresses two interrelated issues concerning the measurement properties and the implied conceptual interpretation of value scores. The first issue is the structural stability of the human value instrument developed by Schwartz. Over the years several studies have tested the measurement invariance of Schwartz value measures across countries and have shown some problems with the cross-cultural invariance. We extend these previous analyses and test both the relative structural features across time as well as across countries within each wave. We compare different strategies that have been suggested previously, using confirmatory factor analyses, alignment and multidimensional scaling with Procrustes rotation. The second and interrelated issue is the possibility of a general response bias factor within the value instrument. A number of authors over the years have argued that response biases such as a tendency to rate all values as more or less important need to be controlled. Such responses tendencies by default should impact structural properties and therefore, this may be tractable via traditional psychometric techniques. Beyond just being a pure methodological artefact, some evidence suggests that these response tendencies may capture substantive variance rather than representing a pure response factor in participants responding to values measures. We explore these contrasting perspectives using both cross-sectional and longitudinal data at the nation- as well as individual-level and link these patterns back to the measurement invariance properties of the instrument.
Value Change in Eastern Europe during 2002-2018: Heterogeneity of Trajectories Across Countries and Cohorts
Maksim Rudnev, Vladimir Magun
University of Waterloo, Canada
Social change among the East European countries has been transforming their cultures for three decades yet only the European Social Survey provides a systematic and repeated measurement of personal values. In this paper, we focused on the change of basic values in East European countries during the period of 2002-2018 as compared to the dynamics in the other parts of Europe. Given that the age-period-cohort analysis is futile, we fitted a series of the descriptive mixed effects models predicting the four higher order values with the year of survey, cohort, their interactions, and a number of controls. Overall, over time, East European population increasingly turned to the Personal Focused in expense of the Social Focused values. We observed decrease in Self-Transcendence as well as increase in Self-Enhancement values within East Europe, whereas outside this region, Self-Transcendence values have been increasing and Self-Enhancement values decreasing. Further results demonstrated that, first, value change as well as between-cohort differences were more pronounced in East Europe. Second, different cohorts have been converging in their values. In some countries (e.g., Russia), the convergence as well as the overall societal value change was due to the older cohorts whereas outside East Europe, younger cohorts led the value change. Third, cross-country similarity of younger cohorts’ values was the highest, and this similarity has been increasing throughout the period of study. Finally, we explored possible moderators of this change (membership in EU, income inequality, wealth) and speculate about possible contribution of the period and cohorts’ aging effects.
Archetypes as anchor points – interpreting value change across generations across countries
Hester Van Herk, Ingmar Leijen
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands, The
Human values from Schwartz’ seminal theory (Schwartz, 1992, 2012) have been used to describe differences between individuals and provide insight in their relationship with attitudes and behaviors. Values are found to be universal and although value priorities are different across countries (Schwartz & Bardi, 2001), similar value structures have been found across countries. Recent, the availability of panel data encouraged research in value change over time (Leijen et al. 2022). In the current study, using the European Social Survey (ESS), we investigate value change across five generations in 29 countries over 20 years (2002-2020). We expect these changes will not be similar across countries over time as contextual differences may affect individuals’ value development.
In Schwartz’ values theory, values are located on a theoretical circumplex with opposing and converging values. On a more general level, the values describe the dichotomy of the importance of group/individual, and change/conservation. Although scores on specific values are insightful, when analyzing value change over time it can be more insightful to look at all values simultaneously: As values are related, change in one value change also affects other values.
To estimate value change over time in the cross-sectional ESS data, following Beugelsdijk et al. (2022), we use archetype analysis (Cutler & Breiman, 1994; Eugster & Leisch, 2009). This approach allows us to describe all individuals in the data using a few distinct observations at the boundary of the datacloud. These few extreme observations are called archetypes and represent a specific combination of value scores. All other observations in the data can be represented as a linear combination of these archetypes. Archetypes are stable, making them suitable for monitoring change across groups and over time.
Using the human values in the ESS, we find 3 archetypes: Growth-focus, Self-focus, and Social-focus. Each archetype clearly shows the oppositions and compatibilities as in Schwartz’ theory. The Growth archetype considers benevolence and universalism of high importance, and power and achievement of low importance. The Self-focus archetype considers achievement and power as very important and universalism, benevolence, and tradition as unimportant. The Social-focus archetype considers security and tradition very important, and stimulation and hedonism unimportant.
We focus on value change between generations, across countries. Following Norris and Inglehart (2019), we distinguish 5 generations: Silent-generation, Baby-Boomers, Generation-X, Millennials, and Generation-Z. As expected in adults, changes in values due to time in the 20 years of the ESS are small but present. However, both between generations and between countries substantive changes in value priorities are found. Over generations, from Silent to X there is a strong increase in Self-focus and a decrease in Social-focus in people holding for all countries. Prevalence of Growth-focus is primarily explained by the political and economic situation in the country: The wealthier and more democratic a country in people's youth, the higher the prevalence of growth-focused individuals. Implications of our findings for both academics and practitioners will be discussed.
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