An empirical investigation into the psychology of Ideal and Actual values

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)By focusing on the Schwartz (1992) value tradition, the main aim of this thesis was to establish that there are meaningful differences between people’s Ideal values and their Actual behavioural expression of values. A total of 645 first and second year students from a university in Australia responded to a number of psychometric instruments designed to measure Ideal and Actual values, traits, opinions, behaviours and psychological health. These investigations show that there are distinct differences in the way people conceptualise their Ideal and Actual values. They also indicate that a person’s innate traits, which were conceptualised via the five factor model of personality (Costa & McCrae, 1992), are distinctly different from their Ideal values and that both Ideal values and traits have a unique influence on the Actual expression of values. These findings are further explored in studies that show Ideal values, traits and Actual values all have unique relationships with both opinions and behaviours. It is also concluded that one of the most widely accepted and used measures of values, the Schwartz (1992) Value Survey, is probably assessing a combination of the Ideal and Actual aspects of values. Moreover, Schwartz’s (1992) underlying theory of values suggests that values can be conceptualised in terms of 10 Universal value types but no evidence was found to support this conceptualisation. Finally the thesis shows that differences between Ideal and Actual values are also related to poor psychological health. From these investigations it is concluded that there are very distinct differences between Ideal and Actual values and that these two aspects of values need to be considered when theorising about, or measuring, values