VALUE SYSTEMS ACROSS CULTURES: AUSTRALIA AND CHINA*

The Rokeach Value Survey was administered to a sample of 140 students at Flinders University in Adelaide, South Australia, and, in translated form, to a sample of 68 students at Shaanxi Teachers University in Xi'an, China. The Australian students ranked the following values as significantly higher in importance compared with the Chinese students: an exciting life, a world at peace, family security, happiness, inner harmony, being cheerful, being forgiving, being helpful, being honest, being loving, and being responsible. The Chinese students assigned significantly higher importance than the Australian sample to a world of beauty, national security, pleasure, social recognition, wisdom, being ambitious, being capable, being courageous, being imaginative, being intellectual, being logical, and being self-controlled. These results are related to other evidence about the two cultures. Implications are discussed, specifically in regard to the dimension of individualism-collectivism and more generally in terms of the need to sample a range of evidence when studying values across cultures.