Within-and Between-Country Value Diversity in Europe: A Typological Approach

European Sociological Review. 2016. Vol. 32. No. 2, First published online: August 24, 2015. P. 189–202.

Magun V., Rudnev M., Schmidt P.

The heterogeneity of within-country populations was largely overlooked in cross-national value research. This paper demonstrates and measures such heterogeneity using a typological person-centered approach instead of a variable-centered approach. Using data from the European Social Survey, populations of 29 European countries are classified based on their values that were measured with Schwartz’s Portrait Values Questionnaire. Latent Class Analysis resulted in five European value classes. All the countries studied are internally diverse in their value class composition, and most of them have a non-zero probability to have members of all the five value classes. Nordic and Western European countries surpass the Mediterranean and Post-Communist Europe in the probability of a class, which combines the strongest preferences for Openness over Conservation and for Self-Transcendence over Self-Enhancement. It is concluded that a person-centered approach provides a new look at within- and between-country value differences, making empirical comparisons holistic and more parsimonious.

Keywords: basic human values, latent class analysis, Portrait Values Questionnaire, heterogeneity, European Social Survey (ESS), cross-national comparison

Publication based on the results of: Between- and within-country value and opinion diversity (2015)