There is a great new book on the market about basic values. For academics, it’s a new point of reference after a long time (for me it was Hitlin & Piliavin, 2004). It’s also great for newbies and anyone who’s just developed their interest in basic values. It sorts things out about what values are, what they depend on, what they can influence, whether they change, or can be manipulated. Gregory Maio did a great job in summarising much of the recent studies.
CONTENTS
The Problem of Human Values.
Section 1: Beginnings in the Empirical Study of Human Values
1. A brief history of values
2. Types of values.
Section 2: Values in Psychology
3. Connections to motives, traits, and habits
4. Connections to ideology and attitudes
5. Components of values.
Section 3: Forces that Shape Values
6. Personal influences on Values
7. Social influences on Values.
Section 4: When and how values matter
8. Effects on prejudice and well-being
9. When values matter
10. How values matter.
https://www.routledge.com/The-Psychology-of…/…/9781841693576

The following is Christian Welzel’s response he kindly provided following the post in which I summarized my criticism of his and Ronald Inglehart’s paper on measurement invariance:

This dismissive portrayal of our contribution does not come as a surprise. Indeed, no one who considers “internal coherence” as the prime criterion of measurement quality can be happy about our article. But that does not make the uncomfortable truth less true: the logic of internal coherence often prompts scholars to disqualify a multi-item construct as invalid, despite the fact that this very construct shows meaningful, important and powerful “external linkages” with its expected correlates. Scholars who advocate internal coherence as the gold standard of measurement quality offer no explanation of why weak internal coherence coexists so easily with strong external linkages. In fact, most of these scholars do not even address this phenomenon. Or they play it down, as if external linkages had nothing to do with a construct’s reality anchorage.

Continue reading →

The short answer is No.
But Christian Welzel has a different opinion. He and Ronald Inglehart have challenged the very common and largely accepted though sometimes tedious and uncomfortable practice of measurement invariance testing. I do not agree with them but their challenge provokes a lot of thoughts and clarifications in a current paradigm.
Aleman and Woods (2015) were one of the few researchers who attempted to check Self-expression values index for measurement invariance across countries. Earlier, Hermann Dulmer and myself were trying to do more or less the same. I simply didn’t have my MGCFA models converged, there was too much non-invariance.
Christian Welzel and Ronald Inglehart do not think that these tests make any sense. Continue reading →

Update: The recent Bell and Jones’ paper summarizes the debate which occurred to be still on: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11135-017-0488-5
 
Discussion between Reither et al. (Yang and Land among authors) and Bell and Jones
This is a rare case of a long discussion between authors: there were four papers responding to each other by Reither et al. and Bell and Jones. The discussion is very recent, so maybe it hasn’t ended yet.
(Actually, discussion appeared even earlier. It began with seminal Yang and Land’s 2006 paper, where they suggested to model period and cohort effects as a cross-classified structure with age at the individual level. Several responses from Bell and Jones followed, for example their 2014 paper was titled “The impossibility of separating age, period and cohort effects”, in which they clarified why the old task of identifying Age = Period + Cohort equation cannot be solved neither theoretically nor practically.)
Continue reading →

* all the articles have been published in Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, below are abstratcs

A Comment on the Index of “Self-Expression Values,” by Inglehart and Welzel
Eduard J. Bomhoff and Mary Man-Li Gu
http://jcc.sagepub.com/content/43/3/373.abstract

Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel have made two strong claims for the index of “selfexpression
values” introduced in 1997 by Inglehart using responses from the World Values
Survey (WVS): first that these values are getting stronger worldwide and second that this is a
necessary condition for a flourishing democracy. In this research note, we document that the
shift to more emphasis on tolerance, trust, and post-materialism—principal components of
the self-expression index—is indeed visible in many countries, but not in East Asia. Also, the
combination of these components into one index is fine on average, but makes little sense for
the East Asian region. Many East Asians maintain some different attitudes toward work, family,
and social issues that would appear traditional and conservative by today’s Western standard
where such conservative values today are held typically by people who are less trusting and
more suspicious of democracy. By contrast, trust, measured in six different ways, as well as
post-materialism, appears compatible with these conservative work and family values in East
Asia. The claim that self-expression values as defined by Inglehart are a necessary condition for
a healthy democracy makes sense in many parts of the world, but not in East Asia.

The Myth of Asian Exceptionalism: Response to Bomhoff and Gu
Christian Welzel
http://jcc.sagepub.com/content/43/7/1039.abstract
In a series of contributions, Welzel describes modernization as human empowerment: a process
that emancipates people from external authority. Human empowerment theory (HET) posits
two sequential mechanisms. First, cognitive empowerment through rising levels of education and
knowledge leads to motivational empowerment, manifest in rising emancipative values. Second,
rising emancipative values nurture mass aspirations for liberal democracy, leading to more effective
democratic practices. Using World Values Survey (WVS) data from a dozen Asian societies,
Bomhoff and Gu claim that Asia is different because these mechanisms do not work among
Asian societies. Against these claims, this response shows that Bomhoff and Gu’s results are
inconclusive. Upon proper examination of WVS evidence, their conclusions turn actually into
the opposite: The emancipative logic of HET applies to Asia as much as it applies to the “West.”

East Asian Exceptionalism — Rejoinder
Eduard J. Bomhoff and Man-Li Gu
http://jcc.sagepub.com/content/43/7/1055.abstract
This short note calls for a more careful examination of value patterns in East Asia, focusing on
the applicability for that region of the Self-expression Index constructed by Welzel (2005). We
show that in East Asia, acceptance of homosexuality, a core component of the index, has a correlation
with the other components that is opposite to what we observe in the rest of the world.
Further analysis indicates that conservative attitudes toward homosexuality in East Asia have no
negative influence on undermining people’s aspirations for democracy. Such an anomaly provides
strong empirical evidence that the Self-Expression Index has limited cross-cultural validity.