A symbiosis : social structure and personal values in the Netherlands

Abstract

I examine the role of personal values in the reproduction of social structures in the Netherlands. Previous research failed to distinguish values from culture, neglected self-transcendence and self-enhancement values and the life-course. I use the life-course perspective to investigate how gender and social class interact with personal values to produce behavior and inequalities. Chapter 2 provides the psychological theory on values and their role in behavior. Chapter 3 describes the association between personal values and age, cohorts, occupations, and households using the European Social Survey. In Chapter 4, I construct a value measure using the Longitudinal Internet study for Social Sciences and the theory of basic human values. In Chapters 5 to 7, I use these value measures and the dual process theory of cognition, status characteristics theory and doing gender to frame the analysis. I show that theoretically informed value measures substantively improve our understanding of value’s relationship to social structures and behaviors. Using longitudinal data, gender is found to effect self-transcendence and self-enhancement values and their in application in choices of fields of study, occupational socialization, the probability of marriage and the production of inequalities in household division of labor.