Basic Human Values in the Swiss Population and in a Sample of Farmers

2011 ◽  
Vol 70 (3) ◽  
pp. 119-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Dobricki

Basic human values were investigated in Swiss farmers. The main objective was to take a first step toward elucidating the structure and profile of basic human values in farmers. Data from the first three rounds (2002, 2004, 2006) of the European Social Survey were used. Value orientations were assessed with Shalom H. Schwartz’s 21-item Portrait Values Questionnaire ( 2003b ). The value orientations of the farmers (n = 125) were compared with those of the general Swiss population (n = 5,055) in terms of structure. In addition, the farmers’ scores in four higher-order value types were compared with those of the general population, managers of small enterprises (n = 103), and production and operations managers (n = 155). The structure of Schwartz’s four higher-order value types were replicated in the Swiss population as well as in the farmer sample. The farmers showed the highest score in conservation, followed by self-transcendence, self-enhancement, and lastly, openness to change. Their value profile differed from that of the general population and that of both groups of managers. According to the farmers’ value profile, recent agricultural policy strategies to promote farmers’ ecological behavior may not be structured and marketed in a manner which is in line with their basic values.

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gwangeun Choi

Abstract This study contributes to the emerging literature on public opinion on a universal basic income (UBI) not only by investigating the role of basic human values in influencing support for UBI but also by examining the moderating role of welfare state development in the association between basic human values and UBI support. Using the European Social Survey (ESS) Round 8 in 2016, which has an item asking whether to support UBI and the 21-item measure of human values that is based on the Schwartz theory of basic human values, the results show that individual universalism that is a self-transcendence value is positively and significantly associated with support for UBI, while the other self-transcendence value, benevolence, has a negative relationship with that; the two self-enhancement values, power and achievement, are positively linked to support for UBI. Additionally, in advanced welfare states, people who are more inclined towards individual universalism are more likely to support UBI; by contrast, in underdeveloped welfare states, this relationship is not apparent.


2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 75
Author(s):  
Ana Carneiro ◽  
Hélder Fernando Pedrosa e Sousa ◽  
Maria Alzira Pimenta Dinis ◽  
Ângela Leite

Values are guiding constructs of social action that connote some actions as desirable, undesirable, acceptable, and unacceptable, containing a normative moral/ethical component, and constituting a guide for actions, attitudes, and objectives for which the human being strives. The role of religion in the development of moral and ideal behaviors is a subject of concern and object of theoretical and empirical debate in various sciences. Analyzing sociodemographic and religious variables, the present work aimed to understand the contribution of religious variables to the explanation of Schwartz’s human values and to identify an explanatory model of second-order values, i.e., self-transcendence, conservation, self-promotion, and openness to change. This study was carried out with a representative sample of the Portuguese population, consisting of 1270 participants from the European Social Survey (ESS), Round 8. Benevolence (as human motivational value) and self-transcendence (as a second-order value) were found to be the most prevalent human values among respondents, with the female gender being the one with the greatest religious identity, the highest frequency of religious practices, and valuing self-transcendence and conservation the most. Older participants had a more frequent practice and a higher religious identity than younger ones, with age negatively correlating with conservation and positively with openness to change. It was concluded that age, religious identity, and an item of religious practice contribute to explain 13.9% of the conservation variance. It was also found that age and religious practice are the variables that significantly contribute to explain 12.2% of the variance of openness to change. Despite the associations between psychological variables (values) and religious ones, it can be concluded that religious variables contribute very moderately to explain human values. The results obtained in this study raised some important issues, namely, if these weakly related themes, i.e., religiosity and human values, are the expression of people belief without belonging.


2019 ◽  
pp. 123-132

The aim of this study is clustering of administrative-territorial units of Ukraine on the basis of value orientations and the electoral choice of the population of these units. The k-means method is used. Creation of macroregions basing on the political orientations of the population is quite widespread, but such approaches have a number of limitations, primarily due to the fact that the list of political leaders or political parties can change significantly in rather short periods of time and because of difficulties with using of several political parties/leaders simultaneously in the analysis. The «value» in this article is defined within Schwartz's theory as desirable goals that go beyond specific situations, differ in importance from each other and are guiding principles in human life. The analysis uses the ten Schwartz's values, which are grouped into four dimensions: «Conservation», «Self-Enhancement», «Self-Transcendence» and «Openness to Change». The data set for this study is combination of two sources of data – sample survey and electoral statistics. Thus, the data set in this study is formed by a combination of the results of the Ukrainian vote in the Parliamentary elections in 2012 and sample survey – European Social Survey – the latest wave of which was held in Ukraine in 2012. The European Social Survey is the most actual source of data on the value orientations of Ukrainians which is in free access. After 2012 this study in Ukraine was no longer conducted. The main result of this study is the creation of clusters of administrative-territorial units based on the similarity of the results of voting and value orientations of population in these units. The first cluster includes administrative-territorial units, where population has more expressed values of Self-transcendence than in Ukraine as a whole. In the second cluster there are units where population has more expressed values of Self-enhancement and Openness to change. The third cluster is characterized by more expressive values of Self-transcendence and Conservation. Except of different levels of expression values, clusters differ by the level of support of political parties that participated in Parliamentary elections. This approach allows evaluate the received cluster structure in dynamics, use in analysis results of national and local elections in different years. Also it makes clustering space two-dimensional, which enables not only to discover similar administrative-territorial units, but also, for example, to identify groups of parties whose supporters share similar values. Although the article uses data from 2012, the successful application of this approach to the clustering of administrative-territorial units opens up the ways for such clustering on more recent data.


Author(s):  
Ingmar Leijen ◽  
Hester van Herk

Preference for professional vs. non-professional or informal healthcare for non-acute medical situations influences healthcare use and varies strongly across countries. Important individual and country-level drivers of these preferences may be human values (the fundamental values that individuals hold and guide their behavior) and country-level characteristics such as social tightness (societal pressure for “acceptable” behavior). The aim of this study was to examine the relation of these individual and country-level characteristics with healthcare preferences. We examined European Social Survey data from 23,312 individuals in 16 European countries, using a multi-level, random effect approach, including individual and country-level factors. Healthcare preferences were explained by both human values (i.e., Schwartz values) and societal tightness (i.e., tightness-looseness scores by Gelfand). Stronger conservation increased, whereas self-transcendence and openness to change decreased preference for professional healthcare. In socially tight countries, we found a higher preference for professional healthcare. Furthermore, we found interactions between social tightness and human values. These results suggest that professional healthcare preference is related to both people’s values and societal tightness. This improved understanding is useful for both predicting and channeling healthcare seeking behavior across and within nations.


Climate ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (11) ◽  
pp. 135
Author(s):  
Narcisa Maria Oliveira Carvalho Dias ◽  
Diogo Guedes Vidal ◽  
Hélder Fernando Pedrosa e Sousa ◽  
Maria Alzira Pimenta Dinis ◽  
Ângela Leite

Climate change (CC) represents a global challenge for humanity. It is known that the impacts of anthropogenic actions are an unequivocal contribution to environmental issues aggravation. Human values are recognized as psychological constructs that guide people in their attitudes and actions in different areas of life, and the promotion of pro-environmental behaviors in the context of CC must be considered a priority. The present work aimed to understand the contribution of attitudes towards CC and selected sociodemographic variables to explain Schwartz’s motivational human values. The sample consists of 1270 Portuguese answering the European social survey (ESS) Round 8. Benevolence and self-transcendence are the most prevalent human values among respondents. The majority believe in CC and less than half in its entirely anthropogenic nature. It was found that the concern with CC and education contributes to explain 11.8% of the conservation variance; gender and concern about CC explain 10.1% of the variance of self-transcendence; and age, gender and concern about CC contribute to explain 13% of the variance of openness to change. This study underlines the main human values’ drivers of attitudes towards CC, central components in designing an effective societal response to CC impacts, which must be oriented towards what matters to individuals and communities, at the risk of being ineffective.


Author(s):  
James Weinberg

Abstract Public faith in politicians and associated systems of governance is desperately low. At the same time, public opinion of politicians is characterized by a vernacular of psychological accusations pertaining to greed, self-interest and careerism. This article tests the verity of these claims by comparing quantitative data on the Basic Human Values (Schwartz 1992) of 106 UK Members of Parliament (MPs) and 134 unsuccessful parliamentary candidates with data collected from the British public in the seventh wave of the European Social Survey. It explores (a) how politicians differ psychologically from those they govern and (b) how personality characteristics such as basic values inform candidate emergence. The study finds that politics is a profession few ‘ordinary’ people care to enter. MPs attribute significantly more importance to Self-Transcendence values than the comparatively conservative population they govern, but the relative importance they ascribe to Power values seems to have an equally strong predictive effect on candidate emergence.


The article is devoted to the analysis of value orientations of Ukrainians based on the data of six waves of the European Social Survey (2004-2012). The aim is to identify the structure of Ukrainian society on the basis of the value orientations of respondents, obtained by the public opinion polling. The dynamics of this structure is also analyzed during 2004-2012. The concept of "value" in this article is defined within Schwartz's theory as desirable goals that go beyond specific situations, differ in importance from each other and are guiding principles in human life. The analysis uses the ten Schwarz's values, which are grouped into four value sectors, which are named «Conservation», «Self-Enhancement», «Self-Transcendence» and «Openness to Change». To identify the structure respondents were divided into three clusters, depending on the expressiveness of value orientations in each sector. The clustering was carried out using the k-means method, while the cluster centers were wrote based on the theoretical conception: the first cluster includes respondents with the most expressed values of «Self-Enhancement» and «Openness to Change», the second one – respondents with the most expressed values of «Self-Transcendence» and «Conservation», the third one – respondents who are closes to average values of all four sectors. The resulting cluster structure was identified in each of the six waves of the European Social Survey. At the same time clusters are differ in a number of socio-demographic indicators, as well as in some social orientations. The third cluster is biggest in the each wave of the survey. It means that the group of respondent who doesn’t have strongly expressed values of any of four sectors is the biggest. It can be explained by the phenomenon of ambivalence of the individual that means combination of views, thoughts, feelings, orientations that are mutually exclusive. It was also found that the trend of increasing the expressiveness of the values of «Self-Enhancement» and «Openness to Change», which manifests itself in the array as a whole, is also observed within the first and third clusters, but the value orientations of the second cluster remain relatively stable.


2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 431-459
Author(s):  
Bruno Šimac ◽  
Tijana Trako Poljak ◽  
Vladimir Ivanović

This paper examines the care for nature in Croatia based on the European Social Survey (ESS) data from Round 4 (2008) and Round 9 (2018) over time and cross-nationally, in comparison with five other Central European (CE) countries (Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia). We correlate the item about the care for nature with Schwartz’s Human Values Scale (HVS), as adapted for the ESS, to investigate whether values as defined by Schwartz serve as good predictors of the care for nature in selected CE countries. We also look at the correlation with respondents’ socio-demographic characteristics. Our analysis reveals that, while there are similarities regarding environmental attitudes and values among CE countries, there are also some individual differences. Croatia shows the strongest increase in the support for the care for nature over the 10-year period, and both Croatia and Slovenia score the highest on the care for nature in 2018. Poland, Slovakia and Czech Republic show an overall stagnation in the results, while Hungary exhibits a significant decrease between 2008 and 2018. Our research in CE countries confirms that Schwartz’s HVS can be predictive of pro-environmentalism. However, while the findings for the higher-order value of Self-transcendence are in line with existing literature, the result suggesting that Conservatism is also a moderately good predictor of the care for nature is somewhat surprising. We posit that the reason could lie in the difference between collectivist vs. individualist value types, which provides a new dimension for the interpretation of environmental attitudes in these countries.


2017 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 665-686 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Cieciuch ◽  
Eldad Davidov ◽  
René Algesheimer ◽  
Peter Schmidt

Measurement invariance is a necessary precondition for meaningful cross-country comparisons, and three levels have been differentiated: configural, metric, and scalar. Unfortunately, establishing the most stringent form, that is, scalar measurement invariance, across groups is difficult. Recently, Muthén and Asparouhov proposed testing for approximate rather than exact measurement invariance, as this may be sufficient for meaningful comparisons. Following their strategy, the results of cross-country approximate measurement invariance tests of the 21-item Portrait Value Questionnaire (PVQ-21) scale to measure values in the European Social Survey are presented ( N = 274,447 respondents from 15 countries participating in all six rounds). Applying the new approximate method for the test of measurement invariance allows both using more moderate constraints of approximate equality of parameters across groups and exploring the extent of noninvariance. Approximate measurement invariance was established in almost all rounds for two higher-order values: openness to change and self-enhancement. In the case of the two other higher-order values, self-transcendence and conservation, approximate measurement invariance was established across a subset of countries.


2010 ◽  
pp. 107-130 ◽  
Author(s):  
V. Magun ◽  
M. Rudnev

The authors rely mainly on the data from the fourth round of the European Social Survey held in 2008 in their comparison between the Russian basic values and the values of the 31 other European countries as measured by Schwartz Portrait Values Questionnaire. The authors start from comparing country averages. Then they compare Russia with the other countries taking into account internal country value diversity. And finally they refine cross-country value comparisons taking the advantage of the multiple regression analysis. As revealed from the study there are important value barriers to the Russian economy and society progress and well targeted cultural policy is needed to promote necessary value changes.


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