Schwartz Values Theory Vs. Inglehart Values Theory

The Co-Head of the International Laboratory of Socio-Cultural Research Peter Schmidt made a presentation “Inglehart and Schwartz approaches in comparison: measurements and theoretical predictions” within the scientific seminar “Culture matters” on 11th April.

He focused on the key concepts of the individual level value orientations in both approaches. P. Schmidt mentioned that a population survey, which includes not only the values but also all dependent variables of both theories, does not exist and will presumably not be created in the near future. Thus the comparison is based on two different surveys, the European Social Survey-2004 (ESS) for measuring the values of Schwartz and the World Value Survey-2005 (WVS) for measuring the values of Inglehart. Schmidt considers relationships between internal variables (internal validity) and external variables which either predict values or are predicted by values (external validity). He has conducted confirmatory factor analysis on empirical base of West Germany. The theoretically derived hypotheses for Inglehart values were supported by the data very well. In the case of Schwartz values the results were mixed. Some hypotheses could be confirmed, others were rejected, and still other relations that were not anticipated became apparent in the data. Schmidt argues that the predictive power of the Schwartz values can partly be attributed to theoretically unexpected effects and may have been increased by the correction of attenuation which could be performed in the covariance structure model.

There were lots of questions and a discussion followed after the presentation which proved the high importance of the topic and high interest in comparison of values theories.

Trainee researcher
Olga Pavlenko