Identifying Culture-Specifics in the Content and Structure of Values

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Using data from 88 samples from 40 countries, the authors reevaluate the propositions of a recent values theory and provide criteria for identifying what is culture-specific in value meanings and structure. They confirm the widespread presence of 10 value types, arrayed on a motivational continuum, and organized on virtually universal, orthogonal dimensions: Openness to Change versus Conservation and Self-Transcendence versus Self-Enhancement. Forty-four values demonstrate high cross-cultural consistency of meaning. In the average sample, about 16% of single values diverge from their proto-typical value types, and one pair of motivationally close value types is intermixed. Test-retest and randomly split sample analyses reveal that some two thirds of deviations represent unreliable measurement and one third represent culture-specific characteristics. Ways to identify and interpret the latter are presented.