Conferences

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 played an important role not only in sociology, but in psychology, anthropology and related disciplines as well. They have been used to explain the motivational bases of attitudes and behaviour and to characterize differences between both individuals and societies. Until recently, application of the values construct in the social sciences has suffered from the absence of an agreed-upon conception of basic values and reliable methods designed to measure these values (Hitlin and Piliavin 2004). In 1992, Schwartz introduced a theory of ten basic human values, building on common elements in earlier approaches (e.g., Allport, Vernon and Lindzey 1960; Parsons 1957; Rokeach 1973; Williams 1968). He also presented a first instrument that measures them that he validated cross-culturally in 1992. In 2001, he presented an alternative instrument that has also been validated across cultures. This theory and two instruments have promoted a revival of empirical research on values in social psychology.

The designers of the European Social Survey chose this theory as the basis for developing a human values scale to include in the core of the survey. This scale was administered to representative national samples in the first three rounds of the ESS, and will be included in future ESS rounds. It is intended as a basis for examining fundamental societal change, for comparing the basic value systems of populations across countries, for understanding how the value priorities of individuals and societies arise, and for investigating how value priorities influence attitudes, behaviour, and policy. The full dataset from the first three ESS rounds is now in the public domain, including a vast amount of information of interest to sociologists, political scientists, economists and others. Thousands of researchers across the social sciences have begun to use these data.

In this session continuing work on the measurement of human values and their correlates using the European Social Survey and other data sets will be presented. Papers analysing values empirically in a cross-cultural and longitudinal perspective are especially welcome.