A Study Of Personal And Cultural Values

This study analyzes American, Vietnamese and Japanese personal values, attempting to understand how it can be ethnographers find large differences in values between cultures, yet empirical surveys find relatively small, almost trivial differences in personal values between cultures.

Cross-cultural psychology has come of age as a scientific discipline, but how has it developed? The field has moved from exploratory studies, in which researchers were mainly interested in finding differences in psychological functioning without any clear expectation, to detailed hypothesis tests of theories of cross-cultural differences. This book takes stock of the large number of empirical studies conducted over the last decades to evaluate the current state of the field. Specialists from various domains provide an overview of their area, linking it to the fundamental questions of cross-cultural psychology such as how individuals and their cultures are linked, how the link evolves during development, and what the methodological challenges of the field are. This book will appeal to academic researchers and post-graduates interested in cross-cultural research.

What are values? How are they different from attitudes, traits, and specific goals? How do our values influence our behavior, and vice versa? How does our culture and environment impact the relationship between values and behavior? These questions and more are rigorously examined by prominent and emerging scholars in this significant volume Values and Behavior: Taking A Cross Cultural Perspective. Personal values are cognitive representations of abstract, desirable motivational goals that guide the way individuals select actions, evaluate people and events, and explain their actions and evaluations. The unique features of values have implications for their impact on behavior. People are highly satisfied with their values and perceive them as close to their ideal selves. At the same time, however, daily interpersonal interaction reveals that individuals hold different, sometimes opposing, value profiles. These individual differences are even more apparent when individuals from different cultures interact. The collected chapters address the links between values and behavior from a cultural perspective. They review studies conducted in various cultures and discuss culture as a moderator of the relationships between values and behavior. Structurally, part I of the volume discusses what values are and how they should be measure; part II then examines the contents of the relationships between values and behavior in different life-domains, including prosocial behavior, aggression, behavior in organizations and relationships formation. Part III explores some of the moderating mechanisms that relate values to behavior. Taken together, these chapters review and synthesize over twenty years of research on values and behavior, and propose new insights that have important implications for both research and for practice.

Cross-cultural research studies belong to two categories: (a) studies to demonstrate 'cultural relativity' and (b) studies to test patterns of relationships between variables. The first type of studies attempt to understand how a particular phenomenon is exemplified in the various cultures that are of interest. The second type of studies probe for patterns of relationships between variables that are universal in nature; even though the behavior exemplified in each culture may be different. In such studies, the cultures being studied become a sample for the world population of cultures. The present study belongs to the second category of cross-cultural research, although the sample is limited to two cultures. (Author).

Introduces the idea of a flexible approach to the human rights movement that returns to basics in an increasingly diverse and multipolar world.

The first comprehensive and statistically significant analysis of the predictive powers of each cross-cultural model, based on nation-level variables from a range of large-scale database sources such as the World Values Survey, the Pew Research Center, the World Bank, the World Health Organization, the UN Statistics Division, UNDP, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, TIMSS, OECD PISA. Tables with scores for all culture-level dimensions in all major cross-cultural analyses (involving 20 countries or more) that have been published so far in academic journals or books. The book will be an invaluable resource to masters and PhD students taking advanced courses in cross-cultural research and analysis in Management, Psychology, Sociology, Anthropology, and related programs. It will also be a must-have reference for academics studying cross-cultural dimensions and differences across the social and behavioral sciences.

This study examines the impact of individual characteristics and cultural values on citizenship performance (CP) in the context of a developing country. Previous studies indicate that many studies have been carried out by selecting only two or three cultural variables and the situation in developing countries is often not clear. The study found that gender and education have significant impact on citizenship performance (CP). While collectivism, future orientation, and uncertainty avoidance are found to be positively related to CP, power distance and masculinity values are negatively correlated with CP. It is also evident that the same cultural value orientation can have both positive and negative impacts on CP, depending on the particular aspect of CP. The findings also reveal that developing countries are not totally different from developed countries as far as the impact of cultural values on CP is concerned. The study contributes to the advancement of CP theories of individual differences and cultural values and the knowledge relevant to developing countries.

In 1981, the European and World Values surveys started the empirical investigation of cultural values on a global scale. This volume builds upon the findings of these surveys and analyzes value change in a number of key countries around the globe. The authors track value change and stability in their respective countries during the last decade (the last two decades where data are available) of the 20th century. All authors have been actively involved in value surveys and have a great deal of expertise in countries that they write on. Thus, the volume is a valuable complement to studies that deal with the topic from a global perspective without providing any detail about individual societies. The countries covered are: Argentina, Austria, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Mexico, the Netherlands, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Turkey and the United States.