“What is important to you?” A preliminary study on value priorities in primary school children

Abstract

Public interest in the topic of values has increased notably within the last few years. Part of this interest also applies to the values of children, with a wide range of topics being the focus of attention. At the same time, there exists a contradictory lack of scientific study on the subject. This article focuses on values in primary school children. The underlying study took place in the autonomous province of Bozen-Bolzano, a trilingual border region in the north of Italy. 450 pupils aged 8-12 years from different schools throughout the territory participated by filling out the Picture-Based Value Survey (PBVS-C) (Döring et al., 2010). Preliminary results show that children consider benevolence values as the most important, followed by universalism and tradition values. In contrast, they attribute least importance to power values, followed by success and conformism values in ascending order.