Tuesday 16th July
Wednesday 17th July
Thursday 18th July
Friday 19th July
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Measuring values in society 1 |
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| Convenor | Mr David Vannette (Stanford University) |
| Coordinator 1 | Professor Yphtach Lelkes (University of Amsterdam) |
Research on political values has spanned several decades in the social sciences (Rokeach, 1968) and has developed into an important area of study for survey researchers. The creation and widespread implementation of Schwartz's (1992) values inventory has been important in directing research on the topic of values, but new techniques and theories have also been constructed and it is important for the broader survey research community to be aware of these developments. The conveners of this session extend an invitation for papers on the topic of measuring values in and across society. Papers in this session may examine methodological challenges or opportunities when assessing values in a population, the development of unique datasets, new approaches to operationalizing values as explanatory variables in analyses, imputation of values from attitudes and opinions, and similar research topics. Submissions incorporating experiments are encouraged as are projects using novel modeling or analysis techniques. Theoretical projects on new ways of conceptualizing values in ways that could ease measurement on surveys are also welcomed, along with work evaluating values measurement instruments and construct validity in comparative contexts. Novel survey measurement approaches are also highly encouraged. Preference will be given to methodologically rigorous proposals that are also firmly grounded in theory and presented in the context of the existing literature. Proposals that are simply descriptive or offer little opportunity to advance the field of research on values are discouraged. Preference may be given to work that is further along in the stages of development.
This contribution claims on empirical grounds that changes in the importance people attribute to a value and changes in the conceptual meaning of that value most commonly interact with each other. They are not independent issues, as is frequently assumed in theory or hoped for to ease the measurement of value change.
While research in the 1970s highlighted value importance changes in societies, Shalom Schwartz and others have, more recently, tried to prove with mixed success: >People differ in the importance they attribute to [...] values. However, the same structure of motivational oppositions and compatibilities organizes their values (Schwartz 2007: 176).<
Constructively challenging implications of this generalization, and drawing on data from longer-established research programs compared to the ESS, it is shown here using multidimensional scaling that value items experiencing the most substantial importance changes over time are also the most dynamic in their conceptual meaning. This counteracts hopes for a stable structure of human values.
But the relationship in question should not merely be seen as a threat to the invariance of value concepts and thus to permitted comparisons of value importance data. Instead, this contribution attempts to explain it based on its social functions and on semantics, and proposes hypotheses specifying the interaction in more detail. As change in value importance and change in value meaning are frequently two sides of the same coin, future measurement of value change requires our giving equal attention to both aspects, and it must enable the interpretation of their common dynamics.
Issue attitudes, or the opinions that people hold on matters of political importance, substantially relate to the social values possessed by members of a society. In most social science, issue attitudes are measured through the use of survey instruments. Once measured, these issue attitudes are used in combination with other survey-measured variables in order to explain causal mechanisms behind much observed political behavior. However, little attention has been paid to the manner in which the salience of partisanship affects the perception of ideological distance between one's in-group versus their out-group.
In this paper, I will present results that demonstrate that the strength of issue attitudes are affected by the salience of partisan identity. I will also explore whether partisan salience affects the ideological distance that individuals perceive between their partisan in-group and out-group. Finally, I will investigate whether the change in ideological distance that partisans perceive relates to other contemporary questions in political behavior, such as the existence and causes of mass polarization.
This paper will inform future survey-driven research into questions of mass public opinion, particularly regarding questions regarding political behavior.
The short version of portrait value questionnaire (PVQ-21) has been included to ESS from very beginning and it has probably become one of the most used data set for value analysis.
Although being the last section of relatively long survey, there might be some concerns about the intensity that respondents put to answering for given 21 value questions.
There exists an usual practice that the respondents with too many missing’s or too homogeneous answers are excluded from latter analyses. But given procedure doesn’t help for other kind of arbitrary answering styles. According to the theory certain values are conflicting with each other and so we can also assess how much ones answers are deviating from excepted value structure. A bigger difference means a higher probability for arbitrary answers.
Given study will systematically analyze the proportion of missing and arbitrary answers in PVQ-21 across all ESS rounds and countries. And it also examines if those aspects are related with the overall length of interview or PVQ administration mode.
So this study should give a general indication how well the PVQ-21 is working in ESS and to describe the effect of administration mode and interview length for the response quality.