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The history of the concept of values is reviewed from its beginnings in the 19th century to the present. Work on values rose to preeminence under Talcott Parsons and his associates during 1950-1965, Nevertheless, the theory they produced was flawed: It lacked sophisticated empirical support, imposed preordained categories on reality, and was formulated at an unresearchable level of abstraction. Alternative theories of values fared only somewhat better. More vibrant is the long tradition of (nonParsonian) empirical studies in various subject areas (e.g. achievement, religion). This body of work, however, is ad hoc in nature: The data produced are essentially noncomparable and do not advance the concerns of value theory. The recent work of Kohn (on class and values) and Rokeach (on general value systems) has begun to remedy the situation. It is suggested that value analysis of the future can only solve past ditficulties if (a) it develops grounded theory and research methods—i.e, hypotheses and techniques tied, from the outset, to the values of real populations; (b) it undertakes simultaneous multitechnique observations of the same population; and (c) it carefully tests some of the important hypotheses from value theory abandoned since the 1960s

Based partially on Spates' thesis (Ph.D)--Boston university.

Various observers, among them Theodore Roszak & Charles Reich, have claimed that the contemporary hip underground is a contraculture already beginning to effect major change in Amer Society. This phenomenon has passed through 3 phases: the Beats, the Hippies, & the current, more generalized, "Hip Generation." Explicit or implicit in these analyses are the following hyp's: (1) The hip underground as a whole (all phases) is more expressive (& less instrumental) than the Amer Mc dominant culture; (2) the Hippie-Hip Generation phase (1967-69); & (3) the highly expressive nature of the hip underground has had the "effect" of changing the dominant Mc structure from a more instrumental (less expressive) position (1957-59) to a more expressive (less instrumental) position (1967-69). These hyp's were tested by means of a comparative content analysis of values (the paragraph being used as the unit of analysis) as indicated by the hip underground press & Mc magazines during these time periods. 2 measures of the values were utilized: a Value Category System delineating explicitly Instrumental & Expressive alternatives & a Likert-type Scale ranging from "Instrumental" to "Expressive." Both measures attained conventionally acceptable levels of reliability. The sample further included the underground press as well as other magazines & newspapers. Results of the Instrumental-Expressive Scale, obtained by analysis of variance, indicated a signif main effect for type of literature. More specifically, results of the Value Category System, obtained by chi-square, supported (1) (chi-square=52.30, df=1, p less than 0.005--one-tail), thereby lending support to the contraculture thesis advanced by many authors. Hyp 2 was not confirmed (chi-square=0.351, df=1, p greater than 0.05--one-tail), & hyp (3) was unsubstantiated (chi-square=0.08, df=1, p greater than 0.05--one-tail), hence casting doubt on the claim of a major shift in Amer values as a result of the "influence" of the underground. Modified AA.