Values And Attitudes in Children and Adolescents: The Ecuadorian Case

Abstract

Despite the importance of moral development for an adequate maturation and adaptation of the individual to his/her social environment, especially for children and adolescents, there is hardly any psychological and educational literature addressing the attitudes and value structures at these stages in Ecuador. Starting from an instrument originally developed for Spanish population, the responses provided by an Ecuadorian sample, representative at the national level, were analysed. In order to reduce the original number of items (198) and obtain a scale with optimal psychometric properties, those items with low consistency and/or discriminative power were deleted, and the underlying components were determined by means of exploratory factor analysis, employing principal components and oblique rotation. Once determined the final scale (69 items), together with the resulting value structure, the solution obtained was submitted to several analyses and tests. Firstly, the internal consistency of the scale was assessed (Cronbach’s alpha = .828). Secondly, the invariance according sex and cohort was checked, finding minimal differences in both cases. Finally, multidimensional scaling and cluster analyses were performed, in order to verify its similarity with other structures found in the international literature; more precisely, with the value structure developed by Schwartz . Results showed that Ecuadorian children and adolescents are alike with respect to their values, but there are also important differences between their value structure and the classical structure by Schwartz. Moreover, our results also showed the existence of important deficiencies, both at the academic and the social and familiar levels, which would need to be addressed, especially with respect to values related to personal development.(Schwartz, 1992; Schwartz, 2012; Schwartz & Bilsky, 1987).