Redefining the value structure of college students in Hong Kong and the mainland of China

Social Behavior and Personality, 1999 by Cheung, Chau-Kiu, Kwok, Siu-Tong

ANOVA controlling for the tendency to rate all items as important, the field of study, sex, years in college, and the father's education showed that China's student and Hong Kong's student did not significantly differ in levels of the three values, socialist value (M = 65.3 vs. 65.6), capitalist value (M = 53.3 vs. 53.6), and feudalist value (M = 73.1 vs. 72.9).

DISCUSSION

Support for the hypothesis implies that the value structure of Chinese students in Mainland China and Hong Kong comprises three factors, pertaining to socialism/Confucianism, capitalism, and feudalism. In other words, value items of the same value factor came closely together in the minds of Chinese students and values of different value factors detached from each other. This exhibits convergent and discriminant validity.

The validity of value structure for Chinese students results from improvement on Bond's (1988) conceptualization and methods. As regards the conceptualization, it incorporates Marx's materialist theory to identify the ideological structure of values. Hence, socialist, capitalist, and feudalist values can become theoretically coherent as they reflect and sustain respective modes of production. The methodological improvement derives from the use of confirmatory factor analysis which formally tests a theoretical model of value structure (Cole, 1987). It avoids problems of artifactuality, indeterminacy, and the inductivist fallacy as in exploratory factor analysis (Mulaik, 1987). With confirmatory factor analysis, the present study also adequately estimated the contribution of the rating tendency to value items instead of fixing it to the variance of the mean score of the items.

FURTHER STUDY

The present study is a first step towards verification of the validity of the 3factor model, including socialist/Confucian, capitalist, and feudalist values, in defining Chinese students' value structure. However, the validation may not be conclusive because the factor model can explain only the covariance of 12 value items in total. This means that the content of these value factors may not be adequate (Fitzpatrick, 1983). However, unlike exploratory factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis confirmed that these factors were beyond chance. Increasing the number of items for each value factor is necessary to confirm the validity of the 3-factor model.

The item pool, taken from Bond's (1988) study may have limitations. Whereas it combined Western value items and indigenously generated items for Chinese culture (Chinese Culture Connection, 1987), the latter does not cover the whole spectrum of Chinese culture. Accordingly, it fails to specify an integration view of Chinese culture, including primarily Confucianism and also Daoism, Buddhism, Mohism, Legalism, and others (Ho, 1995; Li, 1992; Zhao, 1991). In order to represent the complexity of Chinese culture, each dimension should have its indicators. Unfortunately, indicators directly measuring each dimension of Chinese culture are unavailable, except for some indirect measures of Confucianism (Ma & Smith, 1992). Development of comprehensive measures of Chinese culture is worthy of a more rigorous study.