Abstract
The author of this chapter uses two scales – the economically orientated “socialist-laissez faire” (or “left-right”) scale, and the politically orientated “liberal-authoritarian” scale – to consider the effects of education on values. The impact of the interaction between education and social class analysis on social values is formally tested using multivariate models. These models show that for “left-right” values there is an interaction between social class and education – with those holding degree level qualifications within higher social classes more likely to hold “left wing” positions than those with other educational qualifications.
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Notes
- 1.
Rokeach uses the labels “equality” and “freedom” to characterise the two dimensions; Heath et al.’s formulation is preferred here in order to distinguish between economic and social equality.
- 2.
Other scales have also been developed in the British context, most notably a “national-cosmopolitan” scale. However, this scale has not proved as important in understanding political values as the “left-right” and “liberal-authoritarian” scales (Heath et al., 1999).
- 3.
For full details of sampling and methodology please refer to the technical reports for the BSA series.
- 4.
The original versions of the scales had six items for the liberal-authoritarian scale, however one of the items, “The law should always be obeyed even if a particular law is wrong”, was not available on all the surveys in our time series. Moreover, factor analyses suggested it had a relatively weak relationship to the scale. Therefore, to include the widest number of surveys in the analysis, this scale has been reduced to five items. This also results in our two value scales having the same number of items.
- 5.
This section uses only the most recent of the pooled cohorts, which uses data from 2004, 2005, and 2006. This is due to the limited space available for presentation of findings. The broad findings shown in this section are unchanged in the earlier cohorts.
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Surridge, P. (2010). The Making of Social Values: Education and Social Class. In: Stillwell, J., Norman, P., Thomas, C., Surridge, P. (eds) Spatial and Social Disparities. Understanding Population Trends and Processes, vol 2. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-8750-8_12
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