ABSTRACT
The increasing importance of comparative studies across countries and over time has encouraged the collection of survey data in diverse contexts and time points in recent decades. This chapter describes the theory of human values and provides a description of the method that is utilized for measuring values in the European Social Survey (ESS). An analysis of the basic human values scale included in the ESS reveals that Multigroup Confirmatory Factor Analysis (MGCFA) for ordinal data yields very similar results compared to when the indicators are treated as continuous. The chapter summarizes the results of measurement invariance testing using MGCFA under the assumption of normality reported by E. Davidov and P. Schmidt. The theory also postulates dynamic relations of interdependence among the values. Values are compatible if the motivational goals they express can be pursued simultaneously.
