Consensus, stability and meaning in abstract social values

The Social Goal Values Inventory comprises 18 abstract principles that represent people's shared understandings of the good society. While measuring consensus, this instrument also assesses differences in how these shared values are prioritised. Responses from two different community samples were compared across a 20-year period to examine the related issues of consensus and stability in Australian values. Data were analysed at the level of individual items, underlying value orientations (security and harmony) and value types (the security oriented, the harmony oriented, dualists, and relativists). Shifts in individual values over time were meaningful in the context of changes in Australian political culture. The overall picture, however, was one of consensus and stability, with no evidence of value commitment waning in favour of relativism. The findings of this paper are used to support the argument that values as stable individual and socially shared phenomena are ideally located for bridging the gap between micro and macro social processes.