Value hierarchy of future subject teachers in Serbia in the context of Schwartz theory

Abstract

High concordance of value priorities and actual behaviour implies the importance of studying values, especially on teachers as important agents of socialization. The theoretical framework comprises Schwartz theory of individual values, a taxonomy of values which embraces ten value types with different motivational goals. We applied a questionnaire in the form of five-point Likert-scale with a comprehensive list of values on the sample of 163 students, future teachers. The value hierarchy was defined as the set of the most important and less important values. For data analysis we used: descriptive statistics, paired-samples t-test; frequencies of ranks; and principal component analysis. We compared the value hierarchy of our student sample with the results obtained for the samples of students, teachers and representative samples in the cross-national study conducted by Schwartz and his associates. Generally speaking, our research results are in concordance with the results of the cross-cultural study, suggesting that the most important values can be found among the value types benevolence, universalism and self-direction, while less important values belong to the types stimulation, power and tradition. The main difference from the international study results is found in the treatment of the value type tradition, placed at the bottom of the hierarchy by our sample of students.