Gender Differences on the Values Scale for Ethnic Minority Students

Abstract

Participants in the study were 323 Hispanic- and African- American students enrolled in various summer enrichment programs sponsored by Baylor College of Medicine. This sample consisted of 101 males and 222 females who were predominantly African- American and Hispanic-American and had a mean age of 16.70 years (SD = 3.62). All participants completed the Values Scale (VS; Nevill & Super, 1986), a research and counseling instrument that was created to assess intrinsic and extrinsic work values. Work values that differentiated between the male and female minority students in this sample included Creativity, Aesthetics, Altruism, Social Relations, and Life Style, with males placing more emphasis on these values than females. As the VS was normed separately for males and females, differences found in the present study may be due to the cultural differences between the normative sample and the ethnic minorities in the present sample.