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Tuesday 14th July, 11:00 - 12:30 Room: N-132

Basic Human Values 1
Convenor	Professor Eldad Davidov (University of Zurich )
Coordinator 1	Dr Jan Cieciuch (University of Zurich and Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University in Warsaw)
Coordinator 2	Dr Constanze Beierlein (GESIS)

Session Details

The 4th session organizer is Professor Peter Schmidt, peter.schmidt@sowi.uni-giessen.de, University of Giessen

Values have held an important position in the social sciences since their inception. Max Weber treated values as a central component in his analysis of capitalist society, linking the development of capitalism to the values of the Protestant Ethic. Values have played an important role not only in sociology, but in social psychology, anthropology, political science and related disciplines as well. They have been used to explain the motivational bases of attitudes and behavior and to characterize differences between both individuals and societies.

In 1992, Schwartz introduced a theory of ten basic human values, building on common elements in earlier approaches. The designers of the European Social Survey (ESS) chose this theory as the basis for developing a human values scale to include in the core of the survey. Recently, this theory has been extended to include 19 values (Schwartz et al., 2012) and a new scale, the PVQ-RR, has been developed to measure them.

In this session continuing work on basic human values as postulated by Schwartz will be presented. Presentations which discuss (1) The measurement of human values; (2) Values as predictors of attitudes, opinions or behaviour; (3) Value change; and related topics are welcome. Both substantive and methodological papers using cross-sectional, cross-cultural or longitudinal datasets are welcome.

Paper Details

1. Use of Facet Theory in Developing Values Theory of Shalom Schwartz
Professor Kazufumi Manabe (Aoyama Gakuin University, Japan)

I am interested in not only common aspects but also different aspects of human values in various societies. My hypotheses are as follows: Values items of common (general, abstract) aspects will be located in the inner concentric circle, and value items of different (specific, concrete) aspects will be located in the outer concentric circle of the Schwartz’s MDS (or SSA) map. Guttman called this structural configuration as “Radex.” From the above, my idea is to develop the Schwartz model from “Circumplex” to “Radex,” and by doing so, we can approach both aspect of people’s values in various societies.

2. Is there Horizontal Transmission of Adolescent Value Orientations: A Preliminary Methodological Inquiry
Professor Klaus Boehnke (Jacobs University Bremen)
Dr David Schiefer (Jacobs University Bremen)

Studies of value transmission typically distinguish three types of transmission, vertical (intergenerational) transmission (in the family), horizontal (peer-to-peer) transmission, and oblique (intergenerational) transmission (outside the family). The paper discusses possibilities to assess the magnitude of peer-to-peer transmission in one-shot survey studies. Some 1600 students from 97 German school classes filled in the Schwartz PVQ. Hierarchical ANOVA techniques are used to disentangle individual from school class, school, and typical German country-wide preferences (from the ESS) to show that adolescents can be assessed as to their susceptibility to value preferences of peers.

3. A longitudinal study on value change among children in five cohorts
Dr Jan Cieciuch (University of Zurich)
Professor Eldad Davidov (University of Zurich)
Professor Rene Algesheimer (University of Zurich)

We present a longitudinal study on the value development in childhood. Children’s values were measured in Poland
three times (with one-year intervals) using the Picture Based Values Survey, developed by Döring and colleagues
(2010) to measure values differentiated based on the circular model of Schwartz (1992). According to our results, the
circular structure remained stable across the time span, and the children’s value priorities changed in concordance
with the implications of the circular structure: that is, an increase in a particular higher order value was accompanied by a decrease in the opposing higher-order value.

4. Universalism, Conservation, and Attitudes toward Minority Groups
Ms Anabel Kuntz (University of Cologne)
Dr Constanze Beierlein (GESIS Mannheim)
Professor Eldad Davidov (University of Zurich)

Several studies suggest that negative attitudes toward different minority groups can be considered as an expression of one syndrome, called group-focused enmity (GFE). Drawing on this research, we explore the relations of GFE and its elements with universalism and conservation values with a German sample. Employing structural equation modeling, we find that the associations of attitudes toward diverse minority groups with the values conservation and universalism are quite similar.