Abstract
The aim of this dissertation thesis was to investigate primary school children’s, their parents’, and their teachers’ values in the Autonomous Province of Bolzano, a Northern Italian border region characterized by its history and sociopolitical reality. This latter is reflected, for instance, in a tripartite division of the school system according to the language groups (i.e., Ladin, Italian, German) cohabitating the territory. A total of 450 fourth- and fifth-graders (Mage = 9.81, SD = 0.73; 217 girls, 233 boys), 391 parents and 79 teachers from all three schools systems participated in the study by completing a written questionnaire. In line with prior studies, the findings of the present research confirm (1) the existence of a value structure—as postulated by Schwartz (1992, 1994)—in children at an early age, (2) the pan-cultural pattern of value priorities as well as (3) age and gender related differences in specific values importance. Additionally, (4) first language and school system, as well as school location based differences in value priorities, emerged in all three groups of participants. Moreover, (5) when comparing the latter, no differences were found, thus indicating that children, parents and teachers do hold similar values. Instead, (6) within dyad correlations were of moderate size for both parent-child- and teacher-child-dyads (i.e., rmean = .15 and .11, respectively), whereby (7) gender-related trends as reported in literature on value similarities in parents and their adolescent children could, however, be observed. Possible explanations for the findings are discussed and limitations are disclosed (e.g., partly exploratory nature of data analysis).