Michael Adams's books draw heavily on social values research conducted by Environics Research Group, the public opinion research firm Adams founded in 1970. Environics has been a pioneer in social values research in Canada and the United States. With offices and affiliates in Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, Calgary, New York, Washington, and Oakland, CA, Environics is a leader in opinion research, offering corporate and government clients unique insight into values segments and social change in North America.

More on the social values method

More on Environics Research Group

The Theoretical Foundations of Social Values Research

The underlying roots of our measurement system for both understanding the structure of social values in a society and then monitoring changes to them through time, go back more than a century and a half to a curious young Frenchman named Alexis de Tocqueville. De Tocqueville visited the United States in the 1830s in order to examine, first hand, the social and political life of the world's "first new nation." His Democracy in America is to social values research what Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations is to the understanding of economics. Later in the l9th century, economist Thorstein Veblen took another giant step forward in the description and understanding of changes to human social values with his Theory of the Leisure Class.

A generation ago, academic social scientists such as Maslow, Riesman, Bell, Rokeach and Thurstone began to describe and measure social values and explore the dynamics and impacts of them in their contemporary societies. They also identified a hierarchy of social values. For example, Maslow saw a structure and evolution of values from those associated with physical survival at the base level of human needs, to those associated with self-actualization at the highest intellectual and moral levels of motivation. Individuals, and even whole societies, could be roughly characterized according to this values hierarchy depending on their predominant presenting beliefs and concerns.

In everyday parlance, the term 'values' has come to take on a rich panoply of meanings and connotations, as for example the ubiquitous "family values," whose precise nature is often assumed without articulation despite it being a rather nebulous concept. However, psychologist Milton Rokeach first theorised about and defined social values in the 1960s in more precise and denotative scientific terms as having the following properties:

• they are beliefs;
• they are conceptions of, preferences for and prescriptions about desirable modes of conduct or established orientations toward living and existence;
• they are conceptions of, preferences for and prescriptions about desirable end-states of existence and social ideals.

Examples of the first type of beliefs, the means of living, include such values as honesty, hard work, or even "playing the system." Examples of the second type, the ends of living, include such values as status, health, peace, enlightenment, and power and influence.

Such formative and fundamental beliefs about the desirable means and ends of human conduct and existence are thought to be largely moulded in adolescence and early adulthood experience. Social values are informed by a person's prevalent perceptions and learnings provided both in the family and in his/her close kinship group, and by exposure to the predominant socio-historical environment and influences of the times into which he or she is born, is being raised, and comes of age (by which we mean "reaches sentient awareness of the world"). Once massively defined by institutions such as the church and state, values have never been as idealistic or ideological as they were cast in Rokeach's view, but rather can also serve, quite pragmatically, as a person's or society's adaptation to, and justification of, current personal or cultural practises. Those practices - from interpersonal honesty to Machiavellianism, and from social assistance to genocide - are more often than not framed, or even "spun," in terms of the higher order values they serve.

In terms of today's social scientific jargon, at Environics we consider values also to be evidence of "motivated cognition." These are beliefs that both determine and reflect our responses to the world as we struggle to meet such basic psychological and sociological needs as biological survival, connection with our close kinship groups, and our species predilection toward organizing socially in hierarchical and status-defined groups. So, beyond their conceptions as desirable or prescribed means and ends of living, the concept of values has come to capture the deeper motivations behind human behaviour, tendencies of thought and feelings - unconscious as well as conscious - and the intra- and interpersonal dynamics related to them.

As we peel the onion of human motivation we see that a host of different aspects of people's world views are well captured by an assessment of their "values," so defined. These aspects include: expectancies, perceptions, and habits of thought; attitudes, judgments, and opinions; and intentions, tendencies and actions. Values stand in, then, as a good description for a whole host of mental, emotional, and motivational postures and preparednesses (or "sets") with which we conduct our transactions with others and ourselves. What our research really attempts, then, is a rather broadband analysis of the World Views of individuals and of collectives, big and small.

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The Evolution of Social Values

For most of history the pace of change for us humans culturally and technologically, and certainly spiritually, can only be described as glacial. A paradigm shift in world views happened rarely (think agriculture, iron, Christ, Galileo, Gutenberg, etc.) and its effects played out over generations of adaptation to the new invention of things or ideas. Not so in today's rapid world of invention and cultural convergence, where knowledge is discovered so rapidly it can double within half a single generation. Now, the main mechanism for values change at a societal level is generational replacement. Youth are a constant source of new ideas and beliefs that infuse the culture and become predominant as the values of older generations die with their cohort.

But while shaped by the predominant experiences of the world in one's youth, neither are values unchanging things set immutably in stone for the individual. Rather, they evolve even for the person through their lifetime, albeit usually slowly. At the psychological level they change somewhat as a function of a person's lifestage, life challenges and experience. Which parents among us can deny an uncharacteristic but extreme authoritarian impulse or two when confronting a raging child? Moreover, values can change somewhat in response to major socio-historical events as they occur throughout people's lifespans, for example in reaction to the spread of a technology like the PC or a disease like AIDS, as the result of insecurity born of a deep recession, the trauma of face-to-face combat in war, or in the chilling aftermath of an act of terror.

With the development of democracy and pluralism and the corresponding decline in unbending institutional regulation of people's world views in many parts of the world, the character of values has changed from one of high imposed stability and homogeneity within a culture and across time, to one of flux and variability in these facets. And with the accelerated pace of change in most aspects of our world, this trend has been further magnified in current times.

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Social Values Methodology

The social values assessment methodology we employ, which was first developed in the 1960s by Alain de Vulpian and our French colleagues at his company Cofremca in Paris, was invented in response to a wish to understand the evolution and meaning of the spontaneous rejection of traditional values and institutions evident among many young people in French society at that time. Like their North American colleagues in this enterprise, such as Daniel Yankelovich, the initial understanding of the societal structuring and evolution of social values came from extensive qualitative research, primarily from in-depth, one-on-one interviews. This research revealed new attitudes toward order, religious and secular authority, success, social status, the role of the sexes and the place of youth in society, as well as a growing orientation of individuals toward personal autonomy, informality and immediate gratification.

In the early 1970s, the knowledge gained from this qualitative research was used to create questions and scales designed to measure the diffusion of these new values within the French culture. This was accomplished through annual quantitative surveys of representative samples of the population. Thus was born the study of "socio-cultural currents" - the evolution of social values in a culture - and the resulting "Système Cofremca de Suivi des Courants Socio-Culturels" ("3SC"). The system was subsequently extended beyond France into more than 20 countries in Europe and the Americas. On this side of the Atlantic, our partner polling firm CROP, based in Quebec, imported 3SC to Canada in 1983, and with the help of Environics Research Group and Kaagan Research Associates into the United States in the 1990s. Outside of academic studies such as the World Values Survey based at the University of Michigan Survey Research Center, we believe our 3SC-based system is the largest privately funded study of human social values currently conducted on the planet.

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A Technical Look at the Social Values Map

Each new social values map we create for a culture requires about ten steps of detailed methodology leading up to a "trackable" quantitative analysis. While we will not go into the reasons why all these steps are necessary, nor how they are conducted statistically with the specific software algorithms employed, we set down these steps here for general discussion and posterity, and describe the most important facets in detail.

The goal of the first quantitative study in a new country is to understand the major structural relations among the values in evidence there. As more data come in, we begin to explore the currents and trajectories of values evolution in that society. Here are the necessary steps in the work up of a full-bodied socio-cultural profile of a society.

Values Consultation and Sensing

The key to the development of a socio-cultural analysis for any country is the first step, value sensing, for this is where we discover what is existing and prevalent, as well as in later researches what is new, in a society. Through the qualitative research we routinely conduct in a given culture for a wide array of clients, we constantly seek to extract and abstract what is new and potentially important in socio-cultural values terms in relation that which has come before. We ask what is bubbling up from the many generative groups in the culture, from youth and new immigrant groups, to emerging political or religious movements. We try to sniff out what is developing in terms of political counter-culture, new ideologies, technology uptake and resistance, new social forms in the family, changing attitudes toward work, trends in popular culture and entertainment, evolving patterns of consumption, emerging preferences for travel and leisure, new aesthetic and design sensibilities, evolving food and drink preferences, and so forth.

In addition to our ongoing research, we also conduct special studies just for this purpose of values sensing, by finding the opinion leaders, local experts, and market mavens at the sharp edge of the values change wedge in these various topical areas, and then interviewing them in depth. As part of this values trend identification methodology we do in-depth interviews, web-based research, anthropological studies called everyday life researches (EDLs), and countless focus groups with both average and exceptional people. And importantly, we also interview local cultural experts, commentators, and interpreters, and lean on our international colleagues, who also conduct this type of research world-wide, for their experiences and insights. When our preparation is complete, we then sift through the trends collaboratively as a research team, through the benefits and biases of our training individually as sociologists and semioticians, psychologists and marketer researchers, prognosticators and communicators.

In doing this work, this "search for the new," we look for what is likely to be enduring rather than faddish in cultural evolution, so, for example, current fashion and hot-this-season children's toys are not something that are best viewed as constituting what we take to be values. Plus, we look for things that are likely to have multiple manifestations in people's lives. For example, the concern for privacy that is growing in recent years among some members of society, in response to the perceived invasiveness of employers, governments and e-commerce marketers, is likely to have many and several manifestations as people assert their rights to privacy across a wider spectrum of their lives. We would predict that these tendencies, already in evidence among the society's "sensitives," have a good chance of diffusing more generally throughout the culture. But we may be wrong! Only time and empirical data will tell if, or under what conditions, people will accept or reject mandatory drug testing, workplace video monitoring, or e-commerce "leave behinds." To find out which way the cookie crumbles, indeed if it does at all, we need a quantitative survey to assess our hunches, heuristics, and hypotheses about the supposed multiple manifestations of each value.

Questionnaires and Data Collection

To fully understand the Environics socio-cultural system, one must spend some time learning how it is that we create operational measures of each value identified in the qualitative phase, and then analyse these together in "multivariate" (multiple variable) space. Again, we draw on both the work of other social scientists and our own empirical research to understand how best to assess each value and to explore the meaning of these values working in concert in each culture.

The first quantitative stage in the analysis is a familiar one in survey research: to develop and administer a high-quality survey to a representative sampling of the society's population so that valid inferences can be drawn, robust data patterns can be replicated, and confident generalisations can be made about various subgroups in the population. The goal is to translate the subtle and not-so-subtle values and mental postures we have sensed in step one into a set of empirical measures that are valid and reliable, replicable and defensible. This is where science and art really begin to co-mingle in our work, and where if we are any good at what we do, the solid scientific methodology underlying our values measurement system will be artfully conceived, crafted and carried off.

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Values Construction

This represents the heart of the analysis, and it is here that we both validate our hypothesised social values as well as discover new values that emerge from the data using a multivariate statistical technique called principle components analysis (PCA), combined with Cronbach alpha reliability analysis. At the end of this step we hope to have articulated a set of social values that adequately describes the culture under investigation, and from which meaningful and interesting insights can be drawn. For the USA and Canada, we typically assess and track about 100 such values, from those with grand and enduring sociological stature, such as the Need for Status Recognition, Obedience to Authority and Sexism, to those that describe the subtleties phenomenology of everyday life, such as the trends we call Concern of Appearance, Meaningful Moments, and Discerning Hedonism. Through such disparate content, we are better able to capture people's mental, emotional, spiritual and behavioural expectations and response tendencies, and thus the phenomenology of their everyday lives.

Each value comprises the measurement and combination of several survey items in its construction. For example, the value "Global Consciousness" is defined as: Considering oneself a "citizen of the world" first and foremost, over a "citizen of one's community and country," combined with a certain degree of non-ethnocentricity, of feeling affinity to peoples in all countries.

This idea is measured by having respondents agree or disagree on a 4-point scale with several items in the survey, such as the item: "I feel that I am more a citizen of the world than a citizen of my country." The items are combined mathematically to create this value measure, scores are assigned to each respondent on this and all other values, and those respondents scoring highest (or sometimes lowest) on a value are classified as strong (or weak) in evidencing that tendency.

Perceptual Mapping

We again use principal components analysis (PCA), or sometimes factor analysis of correspondence (FAC), to explore the associations between individuals' standing on their many social values. From this analysis emerges a "map-space solution," a set of axes or dimensions that more generally underlie, differentiate and explain the collection of values we have assessed among our respondents. Many such solutions are possible and considered. The axes chosen should allow us to interpret the values together on one common map, to explore their relative positions with other values, and to track their movements through time in a compelling way. The axes are named to capture the main themes of the values and mental postures that define them. While there are typically three to seven axes that best describe the inter-relations among the 100+ values we have assessed in our respondents, we often depict the data in only the two most explanatory and interesting dimensions for the purposes of explicating and communicating our findings.

It is important to remember that our map is about the people who are plotted there. Individuals are assigned a set of axis co-ordinates on the various dimensions and we use these to plot either each individual, the average positions of subgroups of respondents, or indeed the entire population average of a culture, or of that culture at a specific point in time. The axes are chosen, in part, if the anchorings provided by plotting major demographic subgroups make fundamental sense across the values space (for example, older age should be associated with greater conformity, and higher education with autonomy). But this is not our sole criterion for selecting the axes.

It is worth keeping in mind that any type of group, demographic or not, can be defined and plotted on the map, as for example:

• Teenagers;
• Working women;
• High household income earners;
• Mid-westerners;
• Generational cohorts, such as Baby-Boomers;
• Supporters of a political party or position;
• Early adopters of a technology;
• Heavy Brand X users;
• "Somewhat satisfied" customers;
• Dog owners; or
• Particularly strong believers in the value of Ethical Consumerism.

The last example is of particular interest. In order to create the map that positions the 100 social values in the mapspace we adopt the following convention. We place the name of each value we assess at the point on the map where its strongest proponents reside. We define "strongest proponents" as approximately the top 1/5th of people who report they agree with the value (as assessed by all its items combined). In other words, the label "Ethical Consumerism" is positioned on the map by proxy, at the average axes position points of those 20% of individuals strongest in their orientation toward this value, which we operationalise by asking how much they monitor their consumption and buy from companies with good track records in terms of environmental and employee practice.

Each of the groups listed above can also be profiled in detail in terms of all their values to see what their particularly strong and weak value orientations are among the 100 we assess. It is usually the case that a complex array of value standings characterizes any one group, for example the highly educated, but in total they must combine to give the average position for the group we show on our two major values axes. In our proprietary work, we compute a set of scores for all the values that indexes how much stronger or weaker a chosen group is compared to the national average (or any other particular comparison group of interest). The resulting "gestalt" of correlated value orientations for that group provides a rich portrait that can be used for understanding and communicating with them.

Our analysis of North Americans has revealed three major structural axes that can be used to describe the values of the peoples of the United States and Canada (the solution is of course driven by the American axes, given the nearly 10:1 population ratio between the two societies):

• survival versus fulfillment;
• conformity versus individuality; and
• change orientation (openness versus closed-mindedness).

These axes describe the organisation of the values we assess when we consider them as a whole, and the resulting quadrants of this map provide a good description of the major structure of the values shared by a people.

That there have been notable movements on each of these axes in the past decade also makes them very useful in telling the dynamic story of social values evolution in North America. For example, the position points of various groups (e.g., youth, the religious right, Hispanics) can be examined as they shift through time, and their group profiles can be studied over the years to describe the changes in their overall social values portrait. Indeed, we can even plot the evolution and trajectories of entire societies and sub-cultures.

This axes framework is further enhanced by comparison of our work to ongoing qualitative and quantitative research studies conducted world-wide that probe the evolution of values and their meaning in many other cultures. While we can describe the culture-specific particularities and manifestations of values that differentiate societies in that international work, we are also able through such an analysis to integrate the global, cross-country commonalties in social values that bind us cross-culturally in the human experience. The axes of social change that emerge from the 3SC analysis in Canada and the U.S. are congruent with those that social scientists have deduced in studying the evolution of modern culture on other continents and in other cultures as well - an encouraging conceptual replication of our work that speaks to the universality of human values, and to the common set of life challenges we face as a species despite local variations between peoples in history, politics, religion, and social forms.

Inference and Interpretation

Once the primary map, descriptive of the structure and dynamics of values and their evolution, is set for a culture, our fun really begins. For now is when we get to use our map for understanding people's values in much more depth, and for helping the people who pay the bills, our clients, to do so. There are typically many surprises as we plumb the depths of people's world views and motivations, and much subtlety as well.

What do men and women have in common in social values terms; how are they different and how are they changing? What are the values and world views associated with achieving a higher level of education? What are the in-depth values profiles of old people and young people, Albertans and Nova Scotians, New Englanders and Texarcanians, professionals and unionists, Catholics and Protestants? What are the differences in mental postures of people who vote Liberal versus Alliance, are Democrats or Republicans, jog versus bird-watch in their spare time, buy Toyotas versus Fords, drink Coke versus Pepsi, read The New Yorker versus Chatelaine, believe in angels or are atheists, run PCs versus Macs? What does the wider study of values tell us about the people in our society who are most accepting of violence, are opting for voluntary simplicity in their lifestyles, or who are highly entrepreneurial?

Social values provide clues and levers in response to each of these questions, and many more. Perhaps our system's greatest contribution comes from its ability to identify the basic mindsets that are emerging in our culture, as well as globally. Are these the mindsets that we should be teaching our children in order to prepare them adaptively for the new millennium? But then, such a self-laudatory statement about "our contribution" is only possible if, like us, you judge "adaptive navigation" to be a preferred and desirable means of living.

For more information on Environics' Social Values program, contact:

Barry Watson, Ph.D.
President and CEO
Environics Research Group
33 Bloor Street East, Suite 900
Toronto, ON M4W 3H1
Tel: +1 416 969 2810
Fax: +1 416 920 3299
barry.watson@environics.ca

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