Rokeach Value Survey (RVS)

1. Abstract

The Rokeach Value Survey (RVS), developed by social psychologist Milton Rokeach in 1968 and formalized in his seminal 1973 treatise The Nature of Human Values, is one of the most widely cited and foundational self-report instruments designed to assess the human value system. Grounded in cognitive, social, and personality psychology, the RVS conceptualizes values as core prescriptive or proscriptive beliefs guiding human action, judgment, attitude formation, and behavioral self-regulation. The inventory evaluates a total of 36 distinct human values organized symmetrically into two fundamental orthogonal dimensions: Terminal Values, representing 18 desirable end-states of existence (e.g., a comfortable life, equality, inner harmony, salvation, wisdom), and Instrumental Values, denoting 18 preferable modes of conduct or means of behavioral striving (e.g., ambitious, broad-minded, capable, honest, independent, self-controlled).

Methodologically, the RVS utilizes an ipsative rank-ordering paradigm (most prominently operationalized via Form D using movable stickers/cards, or Form E via numerical assignment from 1 to 18) to reflect the hierarchical, comparative structure inherent to internal human value systems. In alternative experimental variants and psychometric adaptations, Likert-type intensity rating scales (ranging from I believe it very much to I disbelieve it very much) have been employed to evaluate individual absolute endorsements. Test-retest reliability across intervals of three to seven weeks yields median stability coefficients ranging between .78 and .80 for terminal values and between .70 and .72 for instrumental values in Form D, with slightly lower values observed in Form E (.74 and .65, respectively). Construct validity has been established through convergent alignments with Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) need profiles, Charles Osgood’s evaluative semantic factor, cross-cultural comparative dynamics, and strong associations with political orientation, religious involvement, and sociodemographic variables. The RVS remains a paramount psychometric benchmark for cross-cultural, organizational, sociological, and social-psychological investigations into human motivation.

2. Keywords

Rokeach Value Survey, Milton Rokeach, terminal values, instrumental values, human value system, ipsative ranking, social psychology, cross-cultural values, psychometrics, motivational orientation, value hierarchy, personal beliefs.

3. Authors

The Rokeach Value Survey was conceptualized and developed by:

• Milton Rokeach, Ph.D. (1918–1988), Professor of Sociology and Psychology at Michigan State University and subsequently Professor of Psychology and Sociology at Washington State University. Rokeach was a preeminent American social psychologist celebrated for his pioneering contributions to the understanding of dogmatism, open and closed belief systems, cognitive consistency, personal values, and attitudinal change. His seminal publications include The Open and Closed Mind (1960), Beliefs, Attitudes, and Values (1968), and The Nature of Human Values (1973).
• Institutional Contributors: Initial large-scale national standardization and methodological validation were conducted in collaboration with the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago and the Survey Research Center within the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

4. Purpose

The fundamental purpose of the Rokeach Value Survey is to operationalize, measure, and quantify the hierarchical organization of human values at both individual and collective levels. Historically, psychological research confounded values with attitudes, social norms, personality traits, and psychological needs. Rokeach established a rigorous psychometric delineation: while an attitude represents an organization of several beliefs focused on a specific object or situation, a value transcends specific objects and situations, acting as an enduring, overarching standard that guides conduct, ideological selection, interpersonal evaluations, moral judgments, and self-presentation.

In clinical, counseling, and social psychology, the RVS serves multiple critical functions:

• Evaluation of Value Systems: The tool assesses how individuals prioritize competing life imperatives, offering a window into internal conflict, identity formation, and moral reasoning. In psychotherapy and career counseling, examining discrepancies between instrumental behaviors (e.g., being ambitious vs. honest) and terminal objectives (e.g., a comfortable life vs. self-respect) helps identify cognitive dissonance and existential ambivalence.
• Measurement of Value Change: Rokeach utilized the instrument to test self-confrontation theory, demonstrating that exposing people to internal contradictions in their value hierarchies induces lasting cognitive realignment and corresponding behavioral shifts (such as civil rights engagement or environmental activism).
• Sociological and Political Research: The survey has been employed across hundreds of studies to systematically map ideological divergence. For example, contrasting political systems (e.g., social democracy vs. libertarianism vs. authoritarianism) can be accurately distinguished through the relative ranking of two key terminal values: freedom and equality.
• Cross-Cultural and Organizational Diagnosis: The scale enables researchers to assess cultural orientation, corporate alignment, generational shifts, and social cohesion across diverse populations without requiring extensive semantic adaptation.

5. Psychological Construct

Rokeach (1973) defined a value as “an enduring belief that a specific mode of conduct or end-state of existence is personally or socially preferable to an opposite or converse mode of conduct or end-state of existence.” The RVS conceptualizes the total value domain as structured into two distinct, interconnected categories: Terminal Values and Instrumental Values.

Terminal Values (End-States of Existence)

Terminal values reflect the ultimate goals, overarching life purposes, or existential conditions toward which an individual or collective strives. Rokeach posited that people possess relatively few terminal values (typically estimated between 18 and 24). Within the RVS, 18 terminal values are captured:

• A comfortable life: A prosperous life; material security and economic well-being.
• An exciting life: A stimulating, active, and adventurous life.
• A sense of accomplishment: Lasting contribution; personal success and achievement.
• A world at peace: Free of war and conflict.
• A world of beauty: Appreciation of beauty in nature and the arts.
• Equality: Brotherhood, equal opportunity for all human beings.
• Family security: Taking care of loved ones; domestic protection and stability.
• Freedom: Independence, free choice, personal autonomy.
• Happiness: Contentedness, positive affective well-being.
• Inner harmony: Freedom from inner conflict; personal peace of mind.
• Mature love: Sexual and spiritual intimacy; deep relational communion.
• National security: Protection of one’s nation from attack.
• Pleasure: An enjoyable, leisurely life; gratification of desires.
• Salvation: Saved, eternal life; spiritual or religious redemption.
• Self-respect: Self-esteem; belief in one’s own worth and dignity.
• Social recognition: Respect, admiration, and approval from others.
• True friendship: Close companionship and authentic relational bonds.
• Wisdom: A mature understanding of life; profound insight and perspective.

Instrumental Values (Modes of Conduct)

Instrumental values encompass preferred behavioral means, character traits, and behavioral styles utilized to pursue terminal end-states. Although the potential lexicon of instrumental behaviors is broad (ranging from 60 to 72 distinct traits), Rokeach isolated the 18 most pervasive, functionally non-redundant modes of conduct:

• Ambitious: Hardworking and aspiring; driven toward achievement.
• Broad-minded: Open-minded; receptive to differing viewpoints and novel ideas.
• Capable: Competent, skilled, and effective in executing tasks.
• Cheerful: Lighthearted, joyful, and maintaining an optimistic disposition.
• Clean: Neat, tidy, and orderly in physical and personal habits.
• Courageous: Standing up firmly for one’s beliefs and convictions despite adversity.
• Forgiving: Willing to pardon others; showing mercy and letting go of resentment.
• Helpful: Working for the welfare of others; prosocial assistance and altruism.
• Honest: Sincere, truthful, and characterized by integrity.
• Imaginative: Daring, creative, and intellectually inventive.
• Independent: Self-reliant, self-sufficient, and autonomous in judgment.
• Intellectual: Intelligent, reflective, and dedicated to mental pursuits.
• Logical: Consistent, rational, and objective in thought.
• Loving: Affectionate, tender, and emotionally expressive.
• Obedient: Dutiful, respectful, and observant of rules and institutional authority.
• Polite: Courteous, well-mannered, and socially respectful.
• Responsible: Dependable, reliable, and trustworthy in fulfilling commitments.
• Self-controlled: Restrained, self-disciplined, and able to regulate impulses.

6. Theoretical Framework

The Rokeach Value Survey is grounded in the functionalist and cognitive-consistency traditions of social psychology, incorporating theoretical principles articulated by Leon Festinger (Cognitive Dissonance Theory) and Fritz Heider (Balance Theory). Rokeach situated human values within a hierarchical, centralized belief system consisting of three interconnected tiers:

1. Beliefs: Specific cognitions regarding physical and social realities.
2. Attitudes: Preoccupations and evaluations oriented toward concrete social targets.
3. Values: The foundational, highly stable core principles that regulate and maintain both attitudes and behavioral scripts.

A central theoretical premise of Rokeach’s formulation is that human beings possess a finite, structurally bounded set of core values. While an individual may hold thousands of specific beliefs and hundreds of distinct attitudes, their value matrix is relatively parsimonious. Rokeach argued that values do not operate in psychological isolation; rather, they form an organized value system—a learned, enduring arrangement of priorities along a continuum of relative importance.

When an individual encounters an ethical dilemma, life decision, or behavioral choice, multiple competing values are inevitably activated. Consequently, human behavioral selection is governed not by absolute, standalone values, but by the relative trade-offs and priority rankings negotiated among them. For instance, in an ethical situation, the instrumental value honest may directly conflict with polite or loving. The behavioral outcome depends entirely on the hierarchical rank-ordering established within the individual’s value architecture. This theoretical stance directly justified Rokeach’s methodological decision to employ a comparative, forced-choice ranking paradigm rather than independent absolute ratings.

7. Validity

The construct, convergent, and criterion-related validity of the RVS has been documented in extensive empirical research spanning more than five decades.

Construct and Convergent Validity

Although Rokeach emphasized that the RVS possessed direct face validity derived from comprehensive lexical and inductive analyses, empirical testing substantiated its theoretical constructs:

• Alignment with Psychological Needs: Construct validation studies examining the alignment between RVS profiles and motivational needs measured by the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) revealed robust, theory-consistent correlations. Needs for achievement, affiliation, and power were selectively associated with specific terminal and instrumental values (e.g., TAT achievement need positively correlated with a sense of accomplishment and capable, while affiliation need aligned with mature love, true friendship, and loving).
• Evaluative Meaning: Psychometric analyses conducted by Homant (1969) mapped the RVS items onto the foundational dimensions of Charles Osgood’s Semantic Differential. The rankings generated by the RVS loaded heavily onto Osgood’s universal Evaluative Factor (Good-Bad), confirming that the survey taps the primary evaluative-semantic substrate of human cognitive appraisal.
• Independent Structural Validations: In cross-cultural psychometrics, Geert Hofstede and Michael H. Bond (1984) utilized RVS item sets across 21 nations, demonstrating that country-level value dimensions extracted from the RVS cleanly replicated Hofstede’s foundational cultural dimensions (Individualism-Collectivism, Power Distance, Uncertainty Avoidance, and Masculinity-Femininity). Furthermore, Valerie Braithwaite (1985) rigorously examined the structural integrity of the RVS, demonstrating that the 36 items successfully capture higher-order social and personal value orientations.

Predictive and Discriminant Validity

The RVS demonstrates exceptional predictive power across varied behavioral and societal criteria:

• Sociopolitical Differentiation: In Rokeach’s (1973) two-value model of political ideology, variations in the rank-ordering of freedom and equality reliably differentiated distinct political philosophies: civil rights activists and democratic socialists ranked both freedom and equality exceptionally high; traditional capitalists and libertarians ranked freedom high but equality low; communists ranked equality high but freedom low; and fascists/authoritarians ranked both freedom and equality low.
• Behavioral Criteria: Longitudinal investigations demonstrated that individuals who assigned high priority to a world at peace and equality were significantly more likely to participate in civil rights demonstrations, join voluntary anti-war organizations, and support humanitarian legislative policies.

8. Reliability

Because the classic administration of the Rokeach Value Survey involves an ipsative (rank-order) measurement design rather than independent Likert items scored additively on a multi-item sum-score scale, standard internal consistency indices such as Cronbach’s alpha cannot be computed in the classical manner. Instead, psychometric stability is established through test-retest reliability using Spearman’s rank-correlation coefficients ($
ho$) or Kendall’s tau ($ au$).

Test-Retest Stability Findings

• Form D (Removable Labels/Cards): Form D, which presents the values as movable adhesive stickers or physical sorting cards, provides superior psychometric stability. In college student cohorts over a 3- to 7-week retest window, median test-retest correlations range between .78 and .80 for the 18 terminal values, and between .70 and .72 for the 18 instrumental values. When retested across a longer 2- to 4-month interval, median reliabilities experience only a minor attenuation of .03 to .05 points.
• Form E (Standard Paper-and-Pencil Numbering): Form E requires the participant to write numbers from 1 to 18 in blank fields alongside the items. This form demonstrates slightly lower stability coefficients: median $
  ho = .74$ for terminal values and $
  ho = .65$ for instrumental values. Rokeach attributed this difference to cognitive fatigue and mechanical constraints, as Form E forces respondents to cross out and rewrite numbers when modifying their rankings, whereas Form D permits continuous, tactile re-sorting until cognitive equilibrium is reached.
• Terminal vs. Instrumental Stability: Across all comparative reliability investigations, terminal values consistently exhibit higher temporal stability than instrumental values. This aligns with Rokeach’s theoretical formulation that end-states of existence represent deeply anchored, foundational existential goals, whereas behavioral modes are more susceptible to situational adaptation.

9. Factor Analysis

The statistical examination of the RVS presents unique challenges and structural insights due to the ipsative (zero-sum) nature of rank-ordered data, where raising the rank of one value inevitably depresses the ranks of others. Despite these mathematical constraints, both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)—as well as Multidimensional Scaling (MDS)—have uncovered consistent latent architectures.

Latent Higher-Order Factor Solutions

Factor-analytic investigations of the RVS, such as those conducted by Feather (1973), Braithwaite (1985), and Bond (1988), have repeatedly identified higher-order dimensions that mirror subsequent value typologies (such as Shalom Schwartz’s Theory of Basic Human Values):

• Factor 1: Self-Actualization / Personal Autonomy vs. Social Conformity: Loading positively with values such as independent, imaginative, broad-minded, freedom, and an exciting life, and negatively with obedient, clean, polite, and salvation.
• Factor 2: Prosocial Benevolence / Other-Direction vs. Egocentric Advancement: Anchored by high positive loadings on helpful, forgiving, loving, equality, and a world at peace, versus high loadings on ambitious, capable, a comfortable life, and social recognition.
• Factor 3: Conservatism / Traditional Moral Security: Strongly defined by family security, national security, clean, obedient, and salvation.
• Factor 4: Cognitive / Aesthetic Openness: Characterized by robust loadings on wisdom, intellectual, a world of beauty, and broad-minded.

When researchers administer the RVS using non-ipsative Likert ratings, Confirmatory Factor Analyses demonstrate acceptable goodness-of-fit indices (e.g., Comparative Fit Index $[CFI] > .90$, Root Mean Square Error of Approximation $[RMSEA] < .06$) across these higher-order latent domains, demonstrating that the structural organization of human values is multidimensional, coherent, and stable across diverse cultural contexts.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

The operational specifications of the Rokeach Value Survey are detailed below:

• Instrument Type: Standardized self-report value inventory employing forced-choice ipsative ranking (or optional non-ipsative Likert rating).
• Item Count: 36 total values, structurally partitioned into:
• 18 Terminal Values (End-States of Existence)
• 18 Instrumental Values (Modes of Conduct)
• Response Formats:
• Form D (Recommended): Physical sorting or gummed sticker labels rearranged on an ordered 1-to-18 template from “Most Important” to “Least Important.”
• Form E (Standard Paper-and-Pencil): Direct numerical rank entry (1 through 18) placed in a designated blank space preceding each value item.
• Experimental / Intensity Rating Format: A 7-point Likert scale assessing individual endorsement intensity for each item: I believe it very much, I believe it quite a lot, I believe it slightly, I am indifferent to it, I disbelieve it slightly, I disbelieve it quite a lot, I disbelieve it very much.
• Administration Time: Approximately 10 to 20 minutes for both lists combined.
• Target Population: Adolescents and adults (normative data established from ages 11 through 90).
• Scoring and Statistical Analysis Rules:
• Because individual ranks are ipsative and mutually dependent, the median and composite rank orders represent the primary measures of central tendency for group-level analyses.
• Group comparisons commonly utilize non-parametric statistics, including the Mann-Whitney U test, the Kruskal-Wallis test, and Spearman rank-order correlations ($
  ho$).
• When sample sizes are sufficiently large ($N > 100$), parametric analyses (e.g., MANOVA, independent-samples $t$-tests) yield comparable, robust results.
• The instrument is engineered for group comparative research, sociocultural profiling, and longitudinal tracking, and is not designed for individual diagnostic classification.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Rokeach Value Survey was initially introduced in 1968 and formally published in 1973 in Milton Rokeach’s book, The Nature of Human Values (Free Press / Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc.). Historically, commercial distribution and testing kits were managed by Consulting Psychologists Press (CPP, now The Myers-Briggs Company).

The instrument has entered wide academic circulation. Researchers may utilize the RVS items for non-commercial scholarly inquiries, thesis research, and classroom teaching, provided proper attribution is given to the late Milton Rokeach and original copyright holders. In academic research settings, researchers constructing paper or online surveys should cite the seminal 1973 text. Commercial implementations, corporate consulting applications, or digital publication within fee-based software platforms may require formal licensing clearance through the estate of Milton Rokeach or current rights holders.

12. References

• Bond, M. H. (1988). Finding universal dimensions of individual variation in multicultural studies of values: The Rokeach and Chinese value surveys. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 55(6), 1009–1015. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.55.6.1009
• Braithwaite, V. A., & Law, H. G. (1985). Structure of human values: Testing the adequacy of the Rokeach Value Survey. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 49(1), 250–263. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.49.1.250
• Feather, N. T. (1973). The measurement of values: Effects of different procedures and contexts on Australian student samples. Australian Journal of Psychology, 25(2), 127–131. https://doi.org/10.1080/00049537308255834
• Hofstede, G., & Bond, M. H. (1984). Hofstede’s culture dimensions: An independent validation using Rokeach’s Value Survey. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 15(4), 417–433. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022002184015004003
• Homant, R. (1969). Semantic differential and value survey: An empirical comparison (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI.
• Robinson, J. P., & Shaver, P. R. (1969). Measures of political attitudes. Survey Research Center, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan. Ann Arbor, MI.
• Rokeach, M. (1968). Beliefs, attitudes, and values: A theory of organization and change. Jossey-Bass.
• Rokeach, M. (1973). The nature of human values. Free Press.
• Schwartz, S. H., & Bilsky, W. (1987). Toward a universal psychological structure of human values. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 53(3), 550–562. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.53.3.550

13. Items of the Scale