Schwartz Values Survey – Short (SVS-21)

Abstract

The Schwartz Values Survey – Short (SVS-21), closely aligned with the shortened 21-item human values instrument developed by Shalom H. Schwartz and adapted for large-scale international research platforms such as the European Social Survey (ESS), is an abbreviated psychometric instrument designed to measure the comprehensive continuum of ten basic personal values. Grounded in Schwartz’s Theory of Basic Human Values (1992, 1994, 2012), this inventory operationalizes universal motivational goals that guide human decision-making, social attitudes, and behavioral trajectories across diverse socio-cultural contexts. The scale assesses ten core value orientations: Universalism, Benevolence, Conformity, Tradition, Security, Power, Achievement, Hedonism, Stimulation, and Self-Direction. These ten motivational types are structurally organized along two overarching higher-order bipolar orthogonal dimensions: Openness to Change versus Conservation and Self-Transcendence versus Self-Enhancement.

Comprising 21 brief verbal portraits or value statements, the assessment typically implements a gender-matched format or standard comparative scale where respondents evaluate the degree to which an exemplar individual resembles themselves on a 6-point anchored response continuum (ranging from 1 = “very much like me” to 6 = “not like me at all”, often reverse-scored for analytical clarity) or an asymmetric importance scale. Psychometric investigations spanning over 80 nations provide robust evidence for the cross-cultural structural validity, configural invariance, and metric equivalence of the scale. Despite the intentional brevity of the tool—which utilizes two items per value domain and three items for Universalism—the instrument demonstrates acceptable ordinal and composite reliability, strong convergent validity with extended inventories (such as the 57-item Schwartz Value Survey and the 40-item Portrait Values Questionnaire), and well-documented predictive power for political orientations, environmental behaviors, pro-social altruism, and consumer choices.

Keywords

Schwartz Values Survey, SVS-21, Theory of Basic Human Values, Shalom H. Schwartz, Portrait Values Questionnaire, cross-cultural psychometrics, value priorities, Self-Transcendence, Self-Enhancement, Openness to Change, Conservation, European Social Survey.

Authors

The conceptual framework, operationalization, and psychometric validation of the universal human values paradigm were formulated by Dr. Shalom H. Schwartz.

• Author: Shalom H. Schwartz, Ph.D.
• Affiliation: Professor Emeritus of Psychology, Department of Psychology, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel; and National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE University), Moscow, Russian Federation.
• Institutional Profile: Faculty Profile / Academic Biography
• Key Collaborators: European Social Survey Core Scientific Team (CST); Bilsky, W.; Boehnke, K.; Meuleman, B.; Davidov, E.; Schmidt, P.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Schwartz Values Survey – Short (SVS-21) is to provide an efficient, theoretically sound, and cross-culturally invariant measurement of individual-level human value priorities without imposing excessive survey burden on participants. Values are trans-situational, desirable goals that vary in subjective importance and serve as guiding principles in an individual’s life. While the original Schwartz Value Survey (SVS; Schwartz, 1992) contains 56 or 57 abstract value items (such as “EQUALITY,” “PLEASURE,” and “SOCIAL ORDER”) evaluated on a cognitively demanding 9-point scale (-1 to 7), its length and abstractness pose severe constraints in multi-topic epidemiological, sociological, and cross-national surveys.

To overcome these methodological bottlenecks, the 21-item short values index was engineered to capture the full circular motivational spectrum in public opinion research. In clinical, organizational, and research contexts, the SVS-21 serves multiple specific functions:

• Cross-National Comparative Research: Providing a standardized benchmark for tracking value shifts across diverse geopolitical regions, demographic cohorts, and socioeconomic strata. It has been administered biannually across dozens of countries within the European Social Survey infrastructure.
• Consumer Behavior and Marketing Analytics: Elucidating how personal values dictate brand loyalty, sustainable purchasing, ethical consumption, and responses to technological innovation.
• Political Psychology and Ideological Cleavages: Explaining voter alignment, ideological extremism, institutional trust, attitudes toward immigration, and support for welfare policies based on higher-order value trade-offs.
• Occupational and Organizational Dynamics: Assessing person-organization value fit, leadership styles, workplace deviance, altruistic corporate citizenship, and vocational choice trajectories.
• Mental Health and Subjective Well-Being: Investigating the “healthy values” hypothesis, determining how prioritization of intrinsic (e.g., Self-Direction, Benevolence) versus extrinsic (e.g., Power, Wealth) values correlates with life satisfaction, psychological resilience, anxiety, and depression.

Psychological Construct

The construct assessed by the SVS-21 is the multidimensional taxonomy of Basic Human Values, defined by Schwartz as cognitive representations of three universal human requirements: biologically based organismic needs, social interaction requisites for interpersonal coordination, and institutional demands for group survival and welfare. Values are ordered hierarchically by importance, transcend specific actions or situations, and guide the selection or evaluation of actions, policies, people, and events.

The instrument operationalizes ten motivationally distinct types of basic values:

• 1. Self-Direction: Independent thought and action—choosing, creating, exploring. Derived from organismic needs for mastery and autonomy. (e.g., valuing creativity, freedom, and curiosity).
• 2. Stimulation: Excitement, novelty, and challenge in life. Derived from the biological need for variety and maintaining an optimal, positive level of physiological and cognitive activation.
• 3. Hedonism: Pleasure or sensuous gratification for oneself. Rooted in organismic needs and the emotional pleasure associated with satisfying them.
• 4. Achievement: Personal success through demonstrating competence according to prevailing social standards. Emphasizes social recognition and performance under competitive conditions.
• 5. Power: Attainment of social status, prestige, control, or dominance over people and resources. Focuses on social esteem and the accumulation of wealth or authority.
• 6. Security: Safety, harmony, and stability of society, relationships, and self. Derives from basic individual and group requirements to eliminate threats and unpredictability.
• 7. Conformity: Restraint of actions, inclinations, and impulses likely to upset or harm others and violate social expectations or norms. Promotes smooth interpersonal and institutional functioning.
• 8. Tradition: Respect, commitment, and acceptance of the customs and ideas that traditional culture or religion provide. Emphasizes subordinate loyalty to shared transcendent cultural symbols.
• 9. Benevolence: Preservation and enhancement of the welfare of people with whom one is in frequent personal contact (the “in-group”). Focuses on voluntary concern, empathy, loyalty, and honesty.
• 10. Universalism: Understanding, appreciation, tolerance, and protection for the welfare of all people and for nature. Combines social justice and egalitarianism with broad ecological sustainability.

Schwartz subsequently demonstrated that Hedonism shares elements of both Openness to Change and Self-Enhancement, while the ten values seamlessly integrate into four higher-order quadrants:

1. Self-Transcendence: (Universalism, Benevolence) — Prioritizing the welfare and interests of others and the planet above personal aggrandizement.
2. Self-Enhancement: (Power, Achievement) — Prioritizing personal interests, dominance, prestige, and individual success over others.
3. Openness to Change: (Self-Direction, Stimulation) — Motivating independent thought, novel exploration, and readiness for unpredictable experiences.
4. Conservation: (Security, Conformity, Tradition) — Motivating order, preservation of the past, resistance to change, and self-restriction to maintain interpersonal equilibrium.

Theoretical Framework

The foundational bedrock of the SVS-21 is Schwartz’s Circular Continuum Model of Values (1992). Unlike independent personality traits (e.g., the Big Five taxonomy) that are conceptualized as separate structural dimensions, Schwartz’s values form a dynamic, motivational continuum arranged in a circular geometrical space. The spatial arrangement reflects psychological compatibilities and conflicts among the underlying motivational drivers.

The core theoretical postulates governing this framework are:

• The Principle of Conflict: Adjacent values in the circular model share compatible motivational orientations (e.g., Power and Achievement both pursue personal superiority; Conformity and Tradition both emphasize subordinating the self to external authority). Opposing values across the circle represent mutually exclusive psychological goals whose simultaneous pursuit produces internal or social cognitive dissonance (e.g., pursuing Power directly conflicts with Universalism; pursuing Stimulation directly conflicts with Security).
• Dynamic Trade-offs: Actions taken in pursuit of any value inherently yield consequences that align with compatible values and undermine conflicting values. Consequently, attitudes and behaviors typically relate systematically to the entire circular structure of values, generating a sinusoid wave pattern of correlations across the ordered perimeter of the circumplex.
• Values as Anchored Priorities: Schwartz asserts that the absolute rating of a single value is far less informative than its relative priority within an individual’s internal hierarchical value hierarchy. Individuals act not upon single isolated values, but rather upon trade-offs between competing priorities. Therefore, centering individual respondent ratings around their individual mean response (MR) is theoretically essential to control for idiosyncratic response styles (e.g., acquiescence bias, general scale positivity) and reflect true intra-individual value hierarchies.

Validity

The psychometric validity of the 21-item Schwartz value operationalization has been extensively evaluated in psychometrics, sociology, and cross-cultural psychology literature:

• Construct and Structural Validity: Multidimensional Scaling (MDS) analyses conducted across over 80 national samples repeatedly confirm the two-dimensional spatial configuration representing the Self-Enhancement vs. Self-Transcendence and Openness to Change vs. Conservation axes. While adjacent values sometimes merge due to the brevity of having only two items per value (e.g., Conformity and Tradition merging into a single cluster, or Universalism and Benevolence coalescing), the overarching bipolar structure exhibits invariant ordering across disparate continents (Bilsky et al., 2011; Davidov et al., 2008).
• Cross-Cultural Measurement Equivalence: Demonstrating measurement invariance is vital for multinational comparisons. Using multi-group confirmatory factor analysis (MGCFA), Davidov, Schmidt, and Schwartz (2008) verified that the SVS-21/PVQ-21 achieves configural and metric invariance across virtually all European Social Survey participating countries. Metric invariance confirms that the factor loadings of the items onto the value dimensions are equal across nations, permitting meaningful cross-national comparisons of regression slopes, covariances, and structural path models.
• Convergent and Discriminant Validity: The scale dimensions correlate robustly with the original 57-item Schwartz Value Survey and the 40-item Portrait Values Questionnaire (PVQ-40). Studies examining the overlap between values and personality indicate that while Openness to Experience correlates with Self-Direction (r ≈ .45 to .55) and Agreeableness correlates with Benevolence (r ≈ .40 to .50), the values constructs demonstrate distinct variance, predicting behavioral indices that personality traits fail to account for (Roccas et al., 2002).
• Predictive and Criterion Validity: Research across multiple disciplines confirms that SVS-21 scores predict empirical outcomes in accordance with theoretical expectations: Universalism reliably predicts pro-environmental behaviors, support for civil liberties, and welcoming immigration policies; Conservation values consistently predict church attendance, political conservatism, and risk aversion; and Power/Achievement values predict competitive career selection and consumer luxury acquisition (Schwartz, 2012).

Reliability

Assessing the internal consistency of short value scales presents specific psychometric challenges. Because each of the ten values in the SVS-21 is operationalized by only two items (with three items dedicated to Universalism), traditional Cronbach’s alpha (α) coefficients are frequently lower than the conventional .70 threshold due to the mathematical dependency of alpha on scale length.

Empirical reliability findings documented in the literature indicate:

• Internal Consistency (Cronbach’s Alpha & Omega): At the level of the ten individual basic values, two-item Cronbach’s alpha values typically range between .45 and .70 across diverse national samples (Davidov et al., 2008; Schwartz, 2003). While modest, mean inter-item correlations typically fall within the ideal range of .25 to .45, indicating acceptable conceptual coherence without excessive item redundancy. When aggregated into the four higher-order dimensions, composite reliabilities and McDonald’s omega (ω) values routinely exceed .75 to .85: Self-Transcendence (α ≈ .78), Self-Enhancement (α ≈ .79), Openness to Change (α ≈ .76), and Conservation (α ≈ .74).
• Test-Retest Stability: Longitudinal evaluations of the 21-item value items over multi-month intervals indicate substantial temporal stability. Test-retest reliability coefficients range from r = .65 to .82 across varying demographics, demonstrating that the tool assesses stable, enduring cognitive value orientations rather than transient affective states.

Factor Analysis

The statistical extraction of the latent structure of the SVS-21 relies primarily on Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) and Multidimensional Scaling (MDS):

Multidimensional Scaling (MDS)

Non-metric and metric MDS (such as ALSCAL or PROXSCAL) in two-dimensional Euclidean space are the primary structural tools utilized by Schwartz. When item inter-correlation matrices are projected into space, the items map cleanly onto a circular perimeter. In empirical evaluations, Stress-1 coefficients reliably fall below .15, and Dispersion Fit Measures (DAF) regularly exceed .95, confirming that the ten basic values maintain their theoretical circumplex topology.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

In standard independent cluster CFA models, modeling all ten distinct values simultaneously using two items each frequently leads to high multi-collinearity or non-positive definite covariance matrices due to the continuous nature of the circular model. To address this, psychometricians utilize specific modeling strategies:

• Higher-Order 4-Factor Models: Specifying four latent factors (Self-Transcendence, Self-Enhancement, Openness to Change, Conservation) demonstrates strong goodness-of-fit indices across multinational datasets: Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA) < .05, Comparative Fit Index (CFI) > .92, and Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR) < .05.
• Centered Unified Models: When adjacent values are combined (e.g., specifying seven or eight latent factors rather than ten, such as merging Tradition and Conformity, or Universalism and Benevolence), full CFA models demonstrate acceptable parameter convergence and factor loadings commonly ranging between λ = .50 and .82 across cultural contexts.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

The operational characteristics of the 21-item Schwartz value assessment tool are detailed below:

• Instrument Type: Brief self-report psychometric inventory / verbal portrait questionnaire.
• Item Count: 21 items total.
  • Universalism: 3 items
  • Benevolence: 2 items
  • Tradition: 2 items
  • Conformity: 2 items
  • Security: 2 items
  • Power: 2 items
  • Achievement: 2 items
  • Hedonism: 2 items
  • Stimulation: 2 items
  • Self-Direction: 2 items
• Format: Brief third-person verbal portraits describing a fictional individual’s goals, aspirations, or desires (available in gender-matched versions: male, female, or gender-neutral adaptations).
• Response Scale: 6-point anchored ordinal scale:
  • 1 = Very much like me
  • 2 = Like me
  • 3 = Somewhat like me
  • 4 = A little like me
  • 5 = Not like me
  • 6 = Not like me at all
• Scoring and Transformation Rules:
  • Step 1 (Reverse Scoring): Recode responses so that higher scores represent greater value importance (e.g., 6 = Very much like me; 1 = Not like me at all).
  • Step 2 (Raw Subscale Scores): Calculate the arithmetic mean of the items comprising each value domain or higher-order quadrant.
  • Step 3 (Centering / Ipsatization – MANDATORY): Calculate each respondent’s Mean Response (MR) across all 21 items (total scale mean). Subtract the individual’s MR from each of their raw value scores. Centering corrects for individual and cross-cultural differences in response tendencies (scale use bias) and converts raw scores into relative value priorities.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

• Initial Publication Year: Theoretical genesis 1992 (SVS-57); the shortened 21-item portrait inventory was developed in 2001–2002 for Round 1 of the European Social Survey.
• Copyright & Intellectual Property: The conceptual framework is authored by Shalom H. Schwartz. The 21-item instrument developed for the European Social Survey is placed in the public domain for academic, non-commercial scientific research under open-science collaborative initiatives.
• Access and Licensing: Non-commercial academic researchers may freely use the scale without paying licensing fees. Proper bibliographic citation of Schwartz’s foundational works and the European Social Survey documentation is strictly required. Commercial applications, corporate consulting, or integration into proprietary diagnostic products require formal authorization.

References

The theoretical foundations, empirical developments, and psychometric validations of the Schwartz Values Survey instruments are documented in the following peer-reviewed works:

• Bilsky, W., Janik, M., & Schwartz, S. H. (2011). The structural organization of human values-evidence from three rounds of the European Social Survey (ESS). Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 42(5), 759–776. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022022110362757
• Davidov, E., Schmidt, P., & Schwartz, S. H. (2008). Bringing values back in: The adequacy of the European Social Survey to measure values in 20 countries. Public Opinion Quarterly, 72(3), 420–445. https://doi.org/10.1093/poq/nfn035
• Roccas, S., Sagiv, L., Schwartz, S. H., & Knafo, A. (2002). The Big Five personality factors and personal values. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 28(6), 789–801. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167202289008
• Schwartz, S. H. (1992). Universals in the content and structure of values: Theoretical advances and empirical tests in 20 countries. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 25, 1–65. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2601(08)60281-6
• Schwartz, S. H. (1994). Are there universal aspects in the structure and contents of human values? Journal of Social Issues, 50(4), 19–45. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-4560.1994.tb01196.x
• Schwartz, S. H. (2003). A proposal for measuring value orientations across nations. In Questionnaire Development Report of the European Social Survey (pp. 259–319). European Social Survey.
• Schwartz, S. H. (2012). An overview of the Schwartz theory of basic values. Online Readings in Psychology and Culture, 2(1), 1–20. https://doi.org/10.9707/2307-0919.1116

Items of the Scale