ASPECTS REGARDING THE THEORY OF THE INDIVIDUAL’S BASIC VALUES

The concept of "value" has a long research tradition in the social sciences, as a field of interest also to philosophers, anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, specialists in management and marketing. M. Rokeach (1973, cited in Tania Ogay, 2004) considers values as the central concept of the social sciences, because all issues that take into consideration these sciences, one time or another, act either as dependent or either as independent variables. Our article aims in the beginning, to define the concepts of "values" and "the hierarchy of values." In the second part we concentrate our work in validating, through the field research that we have done as a part of our doctoral thesis, the basic assumptions of the theory of the individual values, built by S.H. Schwartz (2006) using data from over seventy countries.