Do Human Values Reflect Job Decisions and Prosocial and Antisocial Behavior? A Contribution towards Validating the Austrian Value Questionnaire by Group Comparisons

The Austrian Value Questionnaire was developed on the basis of the Lexical Approach to account for specific facets of values in Austrian culture. It comprises 54 items, constituting five scales, Intellectualism, Harmony, Religiosity, Materialism, and Conservatism, and 13 subscales. To assess construct validity, hypotheses on human values were derived from the literature and tested in Austrian samples of Catholic priests and nuns (n = 30, 8 women, M age = 52.6 yr.), community servants (n = 30, all men, M age = 21.4 yr.), and students of psychology (n = 33, 19 women, M age = 23.8 yr.) and economics (n = 33, 18 women, M age = 23.8 yr.), prisoners (n = 40, 9 women, M age = 34.9 yr.), and drivers who had been fined for driving while intoxicated (n = 35, 5 women, M age = 34.6 yr.). Participants were volunteers. Previous and more recent findings from the USA, Canada, Germany, and Switzerland provided similar results for community servants, students of economics, prisoners, and intoxicated drivers, and thus, the hypotheses for these groups were largely confirmed. Most earlier findings for priests and nuns and students of psychology were not replicated, however. Taking into account that values may change over time and variously in different cultures, the results pose an argument for the construct validity of the newly developed questionnaire.