Testing a new operationalization of the basic values in Estonia on two subpopulations: A Estonian and a Russian speaking subpopulation

Abstract

The Theory of Basic Human Value developed by Shalom Schwartz has held a dominant place on the field of value studies for at least two decades. It has been used widely across countries and different disciplines worldwide. Despite some modest adaptations, the theory has maintained its original form. Still, an increasing number of critical discussions have recently been published throwing doubt upon universality of its inner structure (ex. Mohler and Wohn 2005, Clercq 2006, Perrinjaquet et al. 2007, Davidov and Schmidt 2007, Davidov, Schmidt and Schwartz 2008, Davidov 2008, Knoppen and Saris 2009a, Fischer et al. 2010, Knoppen and Saris 2009b), which in turn have amplified the amount of research on methodological issues. Most of these studies have proposed ways to improve raised model shortages, mainly through unification of some adjacent value types. For example several studies lead by Eldad Davidov (Davidov and Schmidt 2007, Davidov, Schmidt and Schwartz 2008, Davidov 2008), which were all based on ESS data (PVQ21), referred to the need to join 3 sets of values, which showed low discriminant validity. In reflection to these studies Knoppen and Saris (2009a and b) showed that the given grouping of factors was a consequence of misspecifications in the model. They proved that the chosen items for the different problematic values had cross loadings on each other and when these cross loadings were ignored the correlations between the factors became very high sometimes even higher than 1.0. They also showed that an alternative model for the items of same PVQ resolved the problem of high correlations. Their results have been confirmed largely in several recent papers (Cieciuch and Schwartz 2012, Beierlein et al 2012) Schwartz has referred to the Estonian population as one of the most deviating ones (Schwartz 1992: p 21). That fact might have been related with the existence of relatively large ethnic minority in this society, whose value structure could have been varying compared with the one of ethnic majority. Therefore, this paper will test the new model on a representative sample of the Estonia population, collected in late 2008. In doing so the equivalence of the measurement in the two subpopulations will be tested as well.