Session Information
04 ONLINE 24 C, The Formation of Children's Values in Primary Schools
Symposium
MeetingID: 894 8684 8277 Code: hburb0
Contribution
Transmitting values from one generation to the next is discussed as being crucial for the functioning of societies as well as for the personal development of individuals (Barni et al., 2017). Since, overall, research on values in primary school age is still in its infancy, only a handful of studies (e.g., Döring et al., 2017; Laghi et al., 2012) have addressed the issue of value transmission in terms of parent-child value similarities. Most of these studies were able to show that children and their parents share similar value priorities, which is interpreted as the result of successful value transmission (Döring et al., 2017). In contrast, the influence of school on children's values is almost entirely unexplored (Döring & Cieciuch, 2018) although they play an important role alongside families, and teachers, alongside parents, are to be regarded as central socialisation agents within the process of value transmission (Grusec & Hastings, 2015), which is also perceived to be the case from the children's perspective (UNICEF, 2014). In addition to the primary socialisation institution of the family (Grusec & Hastings, 2015), school is consistently identified in the literature as the most important secondary institution (e.g., Hurrelmann, 2006). Despite this, to date, there have been only a few studies investigating the influence of the context of school on the values of primary school children. The present study settles exactly in this research gap by examining the values of primary school children, their parents and teachers and analysing possible similarities in values between the individual parent-child and teacher-child dyads. Overall, 450 primary school children (Mage = 9.81, SD = 0.73) from 4th and 5th grade, 391 parents and 79 teachers participated in the study. The 32 classes were all located in a Northern Italian province and sampling was done by respecting the territorial characteristics. Values were assessed using the Picture Based Value Survey for Children (PBVS-C; Döring et al., 2010) and the Portraits Value Questionnaire (PVQ; Schwartz, 1992). As in prior studies investigating parent-child value similarities within-dyad correlations were calculated by correlating each child’s with their parent’s/teacher’s value system. In contrast to prior studies, the analysis of value similarities revealed only small correlations for both parent-child (rmean = .15; t(384) = 3.10, p = 0.002) and teacher-child dyads (rmean = .11; t(421) = .20, p = 0.028). Possible reasons for these results are discussed, and an outlook on possible future directions is ventured.
References
Döring, A. K., Blauensteiner, A., Aryus, K., Drögekamp, L. & Bilsky, W. (2010). Assessing values at an early age: the picture-based value survey for children. Journal of Personality Assessment, 92, 439–448. Döring, A. K.; & Cieciuch, J. (2018). Werteentwicklung im Kindes- und Jugendalter. Liberi Libri. Döring, A. K., Makarova, E., Herzog, W., & Bardi, A. (2017). Parent-child value similarity in families with young children: The predictive power of prosocial educational goals. British Journal of Psychology, 108, 737–756. Barni, D., Ranieri, S., Donato, S., Tagliabue, S., & Scabini, E. (2017). Personal and Family Sources of Parents’ Socialization Values: A Multilevel Study. Avances En Psicología Latinoamericana, 35(1), 9–22. Grusec, J. E., & Hastings, P. D. (2015). Handbook of socialization: Theory and Research (2nd ed.). Guilford. Laghi, F., Pallini, S., & De Sclavis, R. (2012). Values similarity between parents and adolescents: A preliminary investigation among Italian adolescents. Journal of Comparative Family Studies, 43(6), 915–923. Schwartz, S. H. (1992). Universals in the content and structure of values: Theory and empirical tests in 20 countries. In M. Zanna (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (pp. 1–65). Academic Press. UNICEF (2014). Kinder legen Wert auf ihre Werte: Der Geolino-Unicef-Kinderwertemonitor 2014. https://www.unicef.de/informieren/aktuelles/presse/2014/kinder-legen-wert-auf-werte/56986
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