ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the impact of six social and demographic variables on cultural values: gender, age, education, income, occupation, and marital status. It examines how each of these variables affects the cross-national differences in value prevalence and how the two nations differ in the effects of each. Age not only indicates an individual's maturation and progress through life's stages, but also reflects different socialization experiences, due to events in the surrounding social environment in one's formative years. The education ladder is related to two variables, in ways that are probably similar in the two countries: First, education is an indicator of social status, and second it is dependent upon cognitive abilities and thus a rough locator of individual intelligence within each society. The economic systems of China and the United States are so very different that literal comparisons of occupations might seem meaningless.
