The value of values: exploring the personal values of first year college students and their mothers

Benjamin Lewis Bayly

In this study, students (n=109) and their mothers (n=149, dyads =99) rated how important they found 20 values (e.g. fun, stability, prestige), how important they believed the value was to the other family member, and answered questions about personal health, well-being, and relationship closeness. I was interested in evaluating the importance of ascribing to values in an emerging adult, normative sample, as well as looking at similarity in values among family members, and accuracy of perceptions of values. Preliminary support was found that possessing values is beneficial to college students, as evidenced by negative correlations between value identification and alcohol consumption, and a positive correlation between value identification and positive affect. It appears college students and their mothers value different things in life. Paired samples t-tests revealed that students find more importance in the values of fun; excitement; belonging to a group; career achievement; academic achievement; and prestige, while mothers find more importance in the values of religion/spirituality; safety; learning; caring about the earth; accepting others; health; love; and stability. Additionally, there were few correlations between mothers' report of her values and students' report of their values. While past research has suggested that similarity of values among family members relates to relationship cohesion this was only supported in this study for mothers. Mothers' perceived similarity of values was positively correlated with their report of relationship closeness, but student's perception of similarity was unrelated to how close they felt to their mothers. Mothers were shown to have more accurate perceptions of what their student values than vice versa, as evidenced by a paired samples t-test of overall accuracy, and a positive correlation between mothers' perception of a value and students' report on 15 out of 20 values, while students' perception was positively correlated to mothers' report for only three values. Prior research has demonstrated a connection between relationship closeness and knowing a family members' values, but that was not shown to be the case in this study as accuracy of perception of the other persons' values was unrelated to relationship closeness.

The value of values: exploring the personal values of first year college students and their mothers

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