Table 1
Correlation Between Family Values
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
(5)
(Un)importance of family (1)
-.49
-.38
-.41
.13
Parental duty to child (2)
.37
.70
-.38
Respect for parents (3)
.49
-.34
Obedience of child (4)
-.42
Independence of child (5)
Notes: The unit of observation is a country (N = 70). All family values are country means based on four
waves of the World Value Survey.
Table 1 reports the correlation matrix between these variables. We undertake a
principal component analysis to summarize these five variables into a single index.
Principal component analysis creates a linear combination of the original variables
that captures the variance in the dataset. Parental respect by children, parental
duty to their children, the general importance of family in life and the importance
of obedience as a quality in children all have positive coefficients in the creation of
our index, while independence as a quality in children has a negative coefficient.
Countries such as Switzerland, Belarus and the Czech Republic rank around the
25th percentile in the distribution of this index, whereas countries such as Vietnam,
Chile and South Africa rank around the 75th percentile. Closer to the median of
the distribution are countries such as the United Kingdom and Ukraine.4
