The Eurobarometer (EB) is a survey series that has been conducted since 1973 to monitor public opinion on several issues concerning the European Union. It provides a dynamic measure of the EU citizens’ economic, social and political attitudes toward issues related to the EU including attitudes towards EU policies and institutions and general socio-cultural and political orientations of its citizens, based on a set of standard question over time. In addition to conducting standard EB survey, the EU also conducts special EB surveys which focus on a particular topic of interest to the EU. EB 225/Wave63.1 titled “Science and Technology, Social Values, and Services of General Interest” is one of such special surveys which addressed three special topics. One of the topics was “Social Values, Science and Technology”. In order to measure EU public’s social values in relation to science and technology, it measured social values of respondents.One indicator of social values used by the EB questionnaire was social and political attitudes which assessed the values and ethical principles of European citizens on themes such as overall satisfaction with life, their religious and spiritual beliefs and children’s upbringing. The measure of social and political attitude also included measuring educational values which were assessed on the basis of eight values - independence, obedience, hard work, sense of responsibility, imagination, tolerance and respect for other people, thrift, economizing and avoiding waste and determination, perseverance. These eight values have been used in studies that have used Kohn’s self-direction values. By self-direction it means “the capacity to take responsibility for one’s actions and that society is so constituted as to make self-direction possible; the opposite pole of this concept is conformity to external authority” (Kohn et al.,1997).
Hence, using Kohn’s theory that “child-rearing values reflect a broader set of values” (1977), and using the differentiation of Kohn’s value items into different factors provided by Yi et al. (2004), education values can be divided into two sub constructs:
1. Self-direction values with the items “Independence”, “Imagination”, “Determination/Perseverance”, “Sense of Responsibility” and 2. Conformity values with the items “Hard work”, “Obedience”, ”Thrift/ Economizing and avoiding waste”.
INTRODUCTION AND THEORETICAL ANALYSIS
The Eurobarometer (EB) is a survey series that has been conducted since 1973 to monitor public opinion on several issues concerning the European Union. It provides a dynamic measure of the EU citizens’ economic, social and political attitudes toward issues related to the EU including attitudes towards EU policies and institutions and general socio-cultural and political orientations of its citizens, based on a set of standard question over time. In addition to conducting standard EB survey, the EU also conducts special EB surveys which focus on a particular topic of interest to the EU. EB 225/Wave63.1 titled “Science and Technology, Social Values, and Services of General Interest” is one of such special surveys which addressed three special topics. One of the topics was “Social Values, Science and Technology”. In order to measure EU public’s social values in relation to science and technology, it measured social values of respondents.
One indicator of social values used by the EB questionnaire was social and political attitudes which assessed the values and ethical principles of European citizens on themes such as overall satisfaction with life, their religious and spiritual beliefs and children’s upbringing. The measure of social and political attitude also included measuring educational values which were assessed on the basis of eight values - independence, obedience, hard work, sense of responsibility, imagination, tolerance and respect for other people, thrift, economizing and avoiding waste and determination, perseverance. Respondents were asked to rate these values on a four-point scale ranging from 1 (very important) to 4 (not at all important) with “don’t know” as the fifth score. (Please refer to Figure 1 of Appendix for the question and the item sets on education values).
These eight values have been used in studies that have used Kohn’s self-direction values. By self-direction it means “the capacity to take responsibility for one’s actions and that society is so constituted as to make self-direction possible; the opposite pole of this concept is conformity to external authority” (Kohn et al.,1997). Originally, Kohn (1977) and his colleagues developed the 13-values questionnaire to measure adults’ child rearing values. Kohn’s theory states that “child-rearing values reflect a broader set of values held by parents, a claim supported by empirical findings” (Gabrenya et al., 2008) . Based on factor analysis and structural modeling procedures, twelve of these values could be divided in a bipolar dimension: self-direction versus conformity. This set of child rearing values has therefore been adapted to measure self-direction values in studies examining the relationship between work experience, values and social processes (modernity, social stratification) (Gabrenya et al., 2008).
For instance Yi et al. (2004) adopted the questionnaire in Taiwan on a study which focused on class (education, occupation) rather than on work experiences to study the relationship between social processes and values. Several new items – “Imagination”, “Curiosity”, “Modesty”, “Trustworthy”, “Filial respect” –, deemed appropriate to Chinese culture, were added to the questionnaire while some items from the original questionnaire were omitted. An exploratory factor analysis resulted in four factors for these values. Three of these factors contained Kohn’s items in addition to items added by her. These factors were “Self-direction” (containing “Imagination”, “Curiosity” plus items from Kohn), “Conformity” (containing “Filial respect” plus items from Kohn) and “Harmony” (containing “Modesty” and “Trustworthy” plus items from Kohn). Factor “harmony” which is conceptually similar to conformity included two self-direction items -considerate and responsible- from Kohn’s list (Gabrenya et al., 2008).
Another adaptation was done by Xiao (1999) for the WVS in mainland China by adding some items – “Independence”, “Imagination”, “Determination”, “Thrift/Saving”, “Hard work”. Exploratory factor analysis showed a bipolar factor corresponding to “Self-direction”, along which these items could be divided. “Independence”, “Imagination”, “Determination” loaded positively on “Self-direction”, while “Thrift/Saving” and “Hard work” loaded negatively on “Self-direction”, and therefore would fall under the factor “Conformity” (Gabrenya et al., 2008).
Hence, using Kohn’s theory that “child-rearing values reflect a broader set of values” (1977), and using the differentiation of Kohn’s value items into different factors provided by Yi et al. (2004), education values can be divided into two sub constructs:
1. Self-direction values with the items “Independence”, “Imagination”, “Determination/Perseverance”, “Sense of Responsibility” and 2. Conformity values with the items “Hard work”, “Obedience”, ”Thrift/ Economizing and avoiding waste”. The item “Tolerance and respect for other people” which was used in the Eurobarometer will, therefore, not be included in the analysis. As explained earlier seven of these items were added by Yi et al. (2004) and Xiao (1999). Only the item “Obedience” was adapted from Kohn’s item “Obeying your parents”.
DATA PREPARATION
As the Eurobarometer Survey 63.1 ZA4233 could be considered an institutional dataset, the data preparation for this survey was not so extensive. It was unnecessary to perform “cleaning” on the dataset as the only impossible values were the values already assigned as “missing values” by the data producers. “Screening” was also assumed to be unnecessary; however, standard deviations were checked regardless, and found to be the appropriate size for each variable range (with none so low as to assume invalid answering), thus proving the assumption correct. The data set also only contained pre-selected missing values of 8 for Nationality items and 5 for the Education Values items, thus designating further missing values was unnecessary. The data set only contains few outliers as demonstrated by the z-scores which remained low. Some variables such as v304 for Spain had higher z-scores (6.66), however these values are not high enough to consider these scores outliers and the data should be retained.
It was important to filter out the countries appropriately as various means of citizenship designation were provided by the survey. The data provided a country code of residence for each respondent and there were also separate variables for recipients to designate their citizenship of various European countries. For our purposes, data from citizens of Germany and Spain was needed, thus the variables for nationality were more relevant for our research. Therefore the variables v41 (Q1 NATIONALITY GERMANY) and v43 (Q1 NATIONALITY SPAIN) were filtered to select only those with the value 1 signifying “mentioned” citizenship. In this way we only analyze the data from citizens of our selected countries. There was no other “bad data” found from cleaning up the data set thus no further filtering was necessary.
FACTOR ANAYLSIS
After the data set is prepared one can reduce the amount of data needed by performing factor analysis. As commented earlier theoretically there should be two factors, “Conformity” and “Self-direction” on which the items should load for each country. The original scale began with seven components since “Tolerance/ respect” does not appear in the theoretical construct and factor analysis was performed separately for both cases of German citizenship mentioned and Spanish citizenship mentioned. First the sample size must be found large enough to conduct factor analysis. Germany’s sample included 1527 cases while Spain’s sample included 1028 cases. Considering there were seven original factors this provides a sample size to factor ratio of 218.1:1 cases for Germany and 146.9:1 cases for Spain which fits the assumptions that both samples are sufficiently large enough to perform Factor Analysis. Next the correlation matrix demonstrated all correlations were significant; however, very few of them were strong. Through visual inspection only about half of the correlations for both countries met the ± .3 threshold for valid correlations and the strongest correlation for Germany was .415 and for Spain .578, which are not so strong. However, as some argue visual inspection of the correlation matrix is not enough to make assumptions. Barletts test of Sphericity was checked and found to be highly significant for Spain (chi square (21) ═ 1678.5, p≤ .0005) (Refer to Table 1 in the appendix) and for Germany (chi square (21) ═ 1396.2, p≤ .0005) (Refer to Table 2 in the appendix). With this conclusion we can reject the null hypothesis that the variables in the correlation matrix are uncorrelated and assume that they are significantly correlated. In the Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin(KMO)test of sampling adequacy Germany has a score of .739 (Refer to Table 2 in the appendix) while Spain has a score of .819 (Refer to Table 1 in the appendix)demonstrating that partial correlations are small. Therefore, the sampling adequacy was met. The communalities tables show the total amount of variance of the original item explained by the factors extracted. For Germany the values are between .380 (Independence) and .603 (Thrift/ Economizing) which is not very good but enough in order to attain meaningful results. For Spain the values are between .505 (Obedience) and .687 (Imagination) and thus even slightly better than for Germany.
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