Tuesday 14th July      Wednesday 15th July      Thursday 16th July      Friday 17th July     

Wednesday 15th July, 16:00 - 17:30 Room: N-132

Values and Value Change in a Changing World 1
Convenor	Dr Malina Voicu (GESIS Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences )
Coordinator 1	Dr Hermann Dülmer (University of Cologne)

Session Details

Values are socialized during formative years and deeply rooted in individual personality. However, people do not always strictly follow their value priorities acquired during early socialization and do not ignore changing in their living environment. Ronald Inglehart assumed that economic and physical security during one’s formative years has an important influence on his /her value orientation (socialization hypothesis). On the other hand, values may also adapt to changes in environment (scarcity hypothesis). People who grown up in affluent societies become more tolerant towards minorities or with respect to family norms and sexuality and are more interested and more engaged in politics. What are the long term consequences on values of decreasing affluence due to the economic crisis experienced by many European countries during last years? Do people become less tolerant and less politically engaged? What is the impact of changing in living conditions on different values like universalism, conformity, or security as distinguished by Shalom Schwartz? Does changing in living conditions impact in the same way on values’ structure distinguished by Inglehart and Schwartz? Can similarities and differences be identified?

This session welcomes contributions that try to investigate empirically the impact of changing environment conditions on values and attitudes. We particularly encourage submissions based on international comparisons, using comparative survey data such as European Values Study, World Values Survey, European Social Survey, or International Social Survey Program. Substantive contributions, approaching the impact of changing in living conditions on values as well as innovative methodological approaches, which, by instance, help disentangling age, cohort and period effects, are equally welcomed.

Paper Details

1. Changes in basic human values from a dynamic multilevel perspective
Dr Henrik Dobewall (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain)
Dr Raul Tormos (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain)

Value theories make strong claims about the stability of peoples values. We study Schwartz’s personal values across 25 countries over the 6 rounds of the ESS to explore whether these claims are sustained by the available evidence. We employ a new multilevel strategy to decompose the comparative and dynamic aspects of international repeated cross-sections (Fairbrother 2014, Tormos 2013). We observe that people seem to be readjusting their personal values beyond the formative years. The dynamics of values across countries is associated to the evolution of contextual factors such as country’s wealth and unemployment but not income inequality.

2. Relative Intergenerational Change in Basic Values of European Post-Communist countries
Dr Maksim Rudnev (National Research University Higher School of Economics)
Dr Vladimir Magun (National Research University Higher School of Economics)

The paper presents a new approach to identify intergenerational change in basic values. The proposed approach employs multilevel regression, in which grouping variable is a cohort, countries are independent variables at the individual level and the effect of generation is captured with cross-level interaction between year of birth and country. Based on the data from European Social Survey we demonstrate the individualization shift in younger cohorts of Post-Communist populations as compared to the shift observed among W&N Europeans. The overall tendency is that younger Post-Communist cohorts tend to be closer to their W&N European peers.

3. Religion and Value Orientation in Europe
Professor Annette Schnabel (Bergische Universitaet Wuppertal)

Research claims a close relationship between religion and values. On the basis on the European Social Survey 2004 comprising of the Schwartz’ Human Value Scale, we analyse if it is possible to identify particular value clusters for religious people that differ from those preferred by non-religious people and if such patterns are stable across Europe. One of the major findings is that religious people in Europe differ in being more conservative and rule following. On the basis of different indicators for individual religiousness we find that, despite of popular expectations, that value orientations are influenced through doing religion.

4. The Linkage of Ideology and Acceptance of the Market Model
Dr Jon Miller (University of Michigan, USA)
Professor Ronald Inglehart (University of Michigan, USA)

The World Values Survey has collected a self-rated left-right scale and a set of attitude items related to the acceptance of market or non-market economic policies in more than 60 countries for several cycles of data collection, including the most recent surveys in 2010-11. This analysis will construct a summary measure of individual acceptance or rejection of the market model (using confirmatory factor analysis methods) and relate individual attitudes to their self-rated location on a left-right scale. The results will show that there is a moderately strong relationship between these indicators.