1Self-other agreement in values

Self- other agreement in personal values

Henrik Dobewall1; Toivo Aavik1; Kenn Konstabel2; Shalom H. Schwartz3,4, & Anu Realo1

1 University of Tartu, Estonia; 2 National Institute for Health Development and University of Tartu, Estonia; 3 The Hebrew

University of Jerusalem, Israel; 4 National Research University—Higher School of Economics, Russia

Küsitlusuuringute metodoloogia seminar, 18. oktoober 2013.

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Research question

• Can we judge other people’s values accurately, or are values too subjective to assess?

• Are self-reports valid?• To address this question, we examined self-other

agreement (i.e., the correlation between self- and other-reports) for personal values for four higher-order values.

• Based on the European Social Survey (ESS) Portrait Values Questionnaire (PVQ21).

Schwartz‘s Value Circle•Values are beliefs about “desirable, transsituational goals, varying in importance, that serve as guiding principles in people’s lives” (Schwartz & Bardi, 2001,

p. 269).

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Higher-order values

• Self-Transcendence - striving for sharing and fairness

• Conservation - holding communal-tied preferences for self-restriction and order

• Self-Enhancement -valuing competition and personal gain, even at the expense of others

• Openness to Change - valuing novelty and expression of intellectual, behavioral, and emotional autonomy

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Topics

• http://essedunet.nsd.uib.no/cms/topics/1/

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Human values by Shalom Schwartz

• Chapter 1: The Values Theory

• Chapter 2: Values as dependent variables

• Chapter 3: Values as independent variables

• Chapter 4: Measuring values

• Chapter 5: Higher-order values

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Self-other agreement

• People’s self-reports of their behaviour, attitudes, and personality may be affected by various response biases, for instance, socially desirable responding (Paulhus, 1991).

• How do we know, then, if a person truly endorses Benevolence values highly or rejects Power values?

• One possibility is to collect data through an independent measurement method, using opinions of other people (e.g., peers, spouses, siblings, parents etc.) who know the person well.

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Self-other agreement in related constructs

• An examination of the convergent (Campbell & Fiske, 1959) or consensual (McCrae, 1982) validity has a remarkable history in the fields of- well-being (e.g., Dobewall et al., 2012; r = .55 / Schneider &

Schimmack, 2009; r = .42), - Big Five personality traits (e.g., Connolly et al., 2007; r = .36 / Konstabel et al., 2012; McCrae et al., 2004; r = .40 to r = .70) - or affectivity traits (Watson et al., 2000).

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Subjectivity of values• Personal values might be too privately held personal

concerns (McAdams, 1995) or “too individually subjective” (Hitlin & Piliavin, 2004, p. 359) to be judged by others.

• Rokeach (1973) and Schwartz (1992) both suggest that it is difficult for others to infer a person’s values because a value may be expressed in a variety of behaviours and any single behaviour may express multiple values.

• Moreover, values refer to motivation, not to action, so observers must infer them indirectly.

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Values as very contextualized

• Five Factor Theory of personality: Values, are so-called characteristic adaptations - being formed through the interaction of traits with the environment (McCrae & Costa, 1999)

better assessed by direct observation than traits (Allik & McCrae, 2002).

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Previous research

• The use of other-ratings in value research is relatively scarce (Lee et al. 2009, Rentfrow & Gosling , 2006);

• None of these studies, however, took the examination of self-other agreement as their focus.

• Several did not report many of the agreement correlations (e.g., Murray et al., 2002)

• or did not interpret them meaningfully (e.g., Lee et al.,

2009).

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Correction for measurement error / attenuation (Spearman, 1904)

• Schwartz (2005) explains that the specific values measured with the ESS Human Values Scale / PVQ21 have low reliabilities because each scale has only two items (three for Universalism), and these items were constructed and selected to cover the broad conceptual components of each value rather than to express the same narrowly defined content.

• Cronbach Alpha (Cronbach, 1951) can be used .

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Method

Measures• PVQ21 (Schwartz et al., 2001); 4 higher-order values used.• ‘Short Five’ personality inventory (S5; Konstabel et al.,

2012).Data• N = 101 for self-ratings and N = 96 for other-ratings (x2).• Mean age of 25.7 years (SD = 7.9) / 26.9 years (SD = 9.5).• Acquaintance 9.7 years (SD = 8.2).

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Internal consistency coefficients and self-other agreement correlations for higher-order values

(PVQ21)Cronbach

AlphasSelf-Other Agreement

Self- ratings

Other- ratings

Observed Corrected No. of Items

Openness to Change .75 .79 .50 .65 6

Conservatism .69 .63 .43 .65 6

Self-Enhancement .74 .81 .49 .63 4

Self-Transcendence .57 .79 .45 .67 5

Median .72 .79 .47 .65

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Robustness test

• Consensus similar to that for the Big Five personality traits (S5) in the same sample (median r = .52 / .68).

• Sample 2. Estonian Value Inventory (culture-specific; Aavik & Allik, 2002) - Self-other agreement was also substantial for the six more narrowly defined value factors (median r = .50 / .68).

• Profile (distinctive) correlation (Furr, 2008) supported intra-individual accuracy.

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Exemplar applications

• Sending value messages to others and inferring others’ values is a common activity ...

• Happiness in marriage (Murray et al., 2002)

• Respect for and identification with their leaders in organizations (Graf et al., 2011)

• Social bonds of friends via conveyed value similarity (music taste; Boer et al., 2011)

• Cross-cultural value stereotypes (Dobewall & Strack, 2011)

• Transmission of values from one generation to another (Knafo & Schwartz, 2003)

• Assessing children’s values (future research)

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Conclusions

• Informants can judge targets’ values just as accurately as they judge their well-being, personality traits, emotions, and other individual attributes.

• The results suggest that other-ratings of personal values can be used to validate (see e.g., Sandvik et al., 1993)

and complement (see e.g., Fogarty et al., 2013) self-report value measures.

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Any questions?

„Die Gedanken sind frei“ (1800)