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Tuesday 14th July, 16:00 - 17:30 Room: N-132

Basic Human Values 3
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. Values and Group Boundaries: A Novel Measurement Technique
Dr Rengin Firat (University of Lyon)
Professor Steven Hitlin (University of Iowa)
Ms Hye Won Kwon (University of Iowa)

Values reaffirm social identities by reinforcing moral cohesion, while also amplifying group differences. Building on Schwartz’s value theory, this paper explores the ways people utilize values to draw group boundaries and the effects of moral inclusion and exclusion on well-being and civic engagement. We utilize a novel measurement technique that identifies values attributed to core in-group and out-group members based on data from a new cross-national survey. Results demonstrate that values related to altruism, like benevolence, are particularly important for group boundaries, and these boundaries are implicated in civic life as well as well-being.

2. The influence of ethno-cultural type of family on the value orientations of young people: the Case of Siberia Region
Dr Mariya Abramova (Research Fellow Institute philosophy and law SB RAS Department of ethno-social research)
Dr Anna Almakaeva (HRU Higher School of Economics)
Mrs Galina Goncharova (Institute philosophy and law SB RAS Department of ethno-social research)

The current study deals with the influence of ethnically mixed and heterogeneous families on value orientations of young people. It uses youth samples collected in two regions of Siberia (The Republic Sakha and the Republic of Khakasia), Schwartz`s PVQ and a set of alternative indicators measuring collectivistic and individualistic value orientations. Preliminary analysis demonstrates that young people from Russian families are more inclined to declare individualism but to behave in a collectivistic manner. On the contrary, young people from Sakha and Khakas families are more likely to follow individualistic behavior but to demonstrate collectivistic attitudes.

3. Basic human values higher-dimensional MDS-models and their typologies
Dr Indrek Tart (Tallinn University, Estonian Humanitarian Institute, CCCS)

Schwartz’ Portrait Value Questionnaire (PVQ) had served well in exploring basic values landscape and its correlates of broad social and political activities fields in diverse cultural environments. There are still several limitations to be overcome in quantitative applications of the research. One of them is the dimensionality of the multidimensional scaling (MDS) solutions into which solutions are embedded, as a rule they mostly like plane. Do that is enough?
We will test the circular-like models with data from European Social Survey (2002-2012) 21-item PVQ items (298248 respondents, 35 countries with 50 larger ethno-linguistic communities).