Values express fundamental goals (e.g., kindness) that are important for a person in life and guide its behaviour (Bardi & Schwartz, 2003). The school is an important context for the formation of children’s values (Luego Kanacri et al., 2017). Value priorities and structures can be considered relatively stable over time (Vecchione et al., 2016) as well as across situations and contexts (Döring, 2018). But to what extent value priorities are influenced situationally or contextually, especially for younger children, has not yet been fundamentally researched. In the presents study, we analyse value priorities of children in the context of different survey settings, comparing two research conditions: analogue (paper questionnaire) and digital (tablets). Although studies on the use of tablets in schools have shown effects on the motivation of students (Jones & Issroff 2007), there is a lack of findings on the pathway and extent to which these motivational effects can influence the cognitive and decision-making processes of children (Semmelmann et al., 2016). This contribution focuses on the questions: Does the survey setting (analogue/digital) influence the children's response behaviour? And how do children’s value priorities vary in the two survey groups? To analyse this question, we used the data of an ongoing research project on value development in the school environment. This project is currently investigating value priorities and structures of primary school children in Switzerland according to Schwartz's (1994) model of human values longitudinally. For this purpose, at the first survey time point (Spring 2021) 834 children were surveyed with paper questionnaires, and 304 children completed the survey with tablets using a digital version of the Picture-Based Value Survey for Children (PBVS-C, Döring, 2010) (age M=6.82, range 5-9 years, SD=0.5). The children were randomly divided into groups as whole classes and the groups did not differ in any other way. Using established test procedures for investigating central tendencies of independent samples, we tested whether the children's value prioritisation differed from each other based on the survey condition. To control for possible confounding variables, the analysis was also controlled for gender, migration background and age. We found that the prioritisation of individual value types differed between the survey condition. Children who used the tablets attributed significantly higher importance to stimulation compared to children who completed the PBVS-C on paper. This contribution presents the results on the children's value priorities and discusses the use of digital media in research with primary school children.

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