A new archival approach to the study of values and value--behavior relations: validation of the value lexicon.

Full Abstract

The present effort employs a new archival approach to study values and value- behavior relations, which is likely to be particularly useful in applied settings. A value lexicon was developed on the basis of the Schwartz (1992) value theory to extract lexical indicators of values from texts. The convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity of this measure was established using American newspaper content from 1900 to 2000 vis-à-vis existing self-report measures of values and objective indicators of value-expressive behaviors. Results provide empirical support for the use of the value lexicon to study values and value- behavior relations. First, the value lexicon demonstrated convergence with self-report responses of values. Second, values in American newspapers were associated with objective indicators of their corresponding value-expressive behaviors compared with noncorresponding value- expressive behaviors. Third, patterns of values over this 101-year period exhibited meaningful fluctuations with major historical and political events. The discussion describes new possibilities for future research on values in many applied settings with the value lexicon. The discussion also suggests that the principles of the value lexicon could be adopted to measure other psychological constructs of interest to applied psychology.PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2008 APA, all rights reserved.

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Author information

Author/s: Bardi, Anat (A); Calogero, Rachel M (RM); Mullen, Brian (B);

Affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Kent, Canterbury, United Kingdom. A.Bardi@kent.ac.uk

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Journal Article; Validation Studies

Journal: The Journal of applied psychology (J Appl Psychol), published in United States. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2008-May; vol 93 (issue 3) : pp 483-97

Dates: Created 2008/05/06; Completed 2008/07/29;

PMID: 18457482, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 11/6/2008)

Sourced from the National Library of Medicine. Abstract text and other information may be subject to copyright.

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MeSH headings (categories)

This article was linked to the MESH Headings shown below.

Social Behavior
Social Values
Terminology as Topic
Vocabulary

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