The development and preliminary validation of the Serbian value lexicon – An archival approach to value measurement

Abstract

Values refer to stable beliefs and principles held by individuals, which guide their attitudes, behaviours, and judgments, and play a crucial role in shaping their identities and interactions with others. Studying values in social psychology is important as it provides insights into the motivational forces that drive individuals’ behaviour and decision-making, shaping the dynamics of interpersonal relationships and societal interactions. The aim of this paper is to test the possibility of measuring basic values in the archive and text materials. Based on the Schwartz’s theory of values and earlier work on the value lexicon in English, the Serbian lexicon of values was developed and preliminarily validated on a large-scale Internet-based survey. The lexical co-occurrence of words in the natural language use on the Internet was analysed in order to assess the convergent, discriminant and predictive validity of the lexicon. Lexical co-occurrence analysis showed that the words representing the same values co-occurred significantly more in comparison to the words denoting different values. The pattern of correlations between the values measured in the archive material on the Internet using the value lexicon showed high convergence with the pattern of correlations between the values assessed by the self-reported measures used in the European Social Survey in 2018. The relative prominence of the specific values on the official websites of the exemplar societal institutions and organizations identified by the value lexicon was in line with the expectations and preliminarily confirmed the criterion validity of the lexicon of values. Possible applications of the lexicon of values, as well as some methodological issues pertaining to its future use, are discussed in the final part.