Suchergebnisse

Environmental issues continue to grow in international prominence, owing to the importance of environ- mental conditions to human wellbeing globally. This paper focuses on why people's values toward care for nature and environmental protection change - one of the antecedents to pro-environmental norms and behaviour. We aimed to clarify how individual and country-level contextual factors affect environmental values in Europe. Our cross-national study used data on individual environmental values from the 2004 and 2012 rounds of the European Social Survey, in combination with macro-level data on socio-economic security, countries' environmental performance and educational levels. Country-level results revealed that throughout the studied years, nature held more importance to people in countries with increased levels of unemployment and exacerbated income disparities, including in transitional, post-socialist economies. Care for environment is less prominent in countries already performing well in terms of socio-economic and environmental performance, i.e. in states that may have higher resilience capacity towards adverse environmental impacts. Besides a state's science education, which functions as an effective socialiser of caring for nature, practical experiences with adverse environmental impacts (e.g. health impairment) could be used to predict an increase in the mean value of the natural environment in a country.

The purpose of the current paper is to test whether value similarity may foster social trust in society and whether people have higher levels of social trust when they emphasise the same values that prevail in their country. The relationship between social trust and human values was examined in a sample of 51,308 people across 29 European countries using data from the European Social Survey round 6. Results suggest that value similarity is more important in generating individual level social trust in countries where the overall levels of social trust are higher. There is a stronger positive relationship between value similarity and social trust in Scandinavian countries, which have high social trust levels, while in countries with a low level of social trust, congruity of the personal value structure with the country level value structure tends to decrease the individuals trustfulness.

"It is well known fact that survey data contains always measurement errors, which can in different ways bias the results of the analyses (Alwin, 2007). In quantitative research this problem has been usually ignored due lack of quality estimates and complexity of correction procedure. Although this argument is not valid anymore, as there exists a new approach to determine quality of specific question, based on a prediction of the quality using the program SQP2, which in turn allows correcting for measurement error by following a relatively simple procedure (Saris & Revilla, 2015). During the recent years, there have been an increasing number of studies researching the structure of basic human values (Schwartz, 1992), which has resulted with improvements in the theory and led to a new 19-factor value model (Schwartz et al., 2012; Saris, Knoppen, & Schwartz, 2013). Although none of recent studies have considered the measurement error, which can potentially also have an effect on the structure. Therefor in this paper we will try to overcome this shortcoming and will be analysing the effect of the correction for measurement error on the structure of basic human values. We use same representative data from Estonia that was used in study of Lilleoja and Saris (2014), which enables to compare value structures before and after the correction for measurement error. Due to the existence of large ethnic minority in Estonian society, the sample allowed additionally testing the equivalence of the measurement in the two subpopulations after correcting for measurement error. This study shows that the correction for measurement error provides additional support for the validity of new value structure and it also shades some new light on the cross-cultural equivalence." (author's abstract)