Value research and, in particular the World Values Survey and Inglehart’s and Welzel’s Human Development Theory were one of my academic interests since early on in my undergraduate studies of Integrated Social Sciences at Jacobs University Bremen. I had worked on this topic with colleagues and would later write my BA thesis on the topic.
This is why I gladly accepted when Franziska Deutsch, project manager for the german analysis of the latest, now 5th wave of the World Values Survey asked me during the summer break of 2006 whether I wanted to join the German Research Council-funded project as a junior project assistant, lead by principal investigator and co-director of the World Values Survey, my teacher and academic advisor Prof. Dr. Chris Welzel. I was excited about this opportunity to get involved in current research, learn from the other team members, and, together with them, get my hands on fresh-out-of-the-field data, that had never been analyzed before.
The first objective, once the dataset was readily available and “clean”, was to compare different value measurements included in the 2005 wave, or, more specifically, to investigate the structure and dimensionality of values: how are value orientations organized? How can we meaningfully summarize them? And, related, how should we measure them?
The German 2005 wave of the World Values Survey was the first to include four value concepts and respective measurments: the “traditional” Inglehart (1977) battery of materialism versus postmaterialism items, Inglehart’s and Welzel’s (2005) recent suggestion of secular-rational and self-expression values as well as a subsample of Schwartz’s (1992, 1994) value circle battery and the similar German concept developed by Klages and Gensicke (Klages 1984, 1988; Klages & Gensicke 2005).
Comparing these value concepts is not a merely esoteric enterprise: the underlying questions are very real and significant. Do people rate or rank values and norms? To which degree are values pre-formulated, when are they produced ad-hoc (related to the social psychological work on attitude formation that I have worked for a class previously)? If value change is not a simple linear process from one pole (such as materialism, traditionalism) to another (post-materialism, modernity), how many dimensions are there, and what are those? And if there are many dimensions (and they are hardly ever orthogonal as they should be …), how do we make such a complicated picture intelligible for debate?
Maybe the most mind-boggling question that plagued us over and over again, is the relationship between the mode of measurement and the empirical reality that measurement conditions or produces – the quintessential constructivist critique: if you ask a person about a hierarchy of values, you will get exactly that.
After a year of long meetings over sophisticated statistical tests and pages of SPSS syntax, the important analyses are now completed and the results are documented. The documentation, for which I have provided a first draft on behalf of the other team members may be added here sometime soon. More information is also available on the project website.
I have much enjoyed working on this project during the past year – even when it was technically frustrating at times -, and I am grateful for this early opportunity to be involved in research. I am greatly indebted to the other team members, in particular Franziska Deutsch and Prof. Dr. Christian Welzel for this learning experience. I have probably gained more academically through this project than through any single course at Jacobs University.
Please find the entire project report available for download here.
