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 higherorder values.
• Based on the European Social Survey (ESS) Portrait
Values Questionnaire (PVQ21).
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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).
Higher-order values
• Self-Transcendence
- striving for sharing and fairness
• Conservation
- holding communal-tied preferences for selfrestriction 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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Self-other agreement in values
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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 socalled 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
Alphas
SelfOtherratings
ratings
Self-Other
Agreement
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)
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