Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck's Values Orientation Theory

Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck's values orientation theory, put forward in 1961 by Florence Kluckhohn and Fred Strodtbeck, proposes that every human society must answer a limited set of universal problems, such as its relationship to time, to nature and to other people, and its basic view of human motives and human nature, and that the value-based answers to these problems are themselves limited in number and broadly known, even though different cultures favor different answers. Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck suggested alternate answers to all five questions, developed culture-specific measures for each, and described the resulting value-orientation profiles of five cultural groups in the southwestern United States; their framework has since been tested across many other cultures and used both to help negotiating ethnic groups understand one another and to examine the value changes that migration produces across generations. Later theories of universal values, from Milton Rokeach, Geert Hofstede and Shalom Schwartz, have produced concepts similar enough to this one that cross-cultural psychologists take it as evidence a genuinely universal set of human values exists and that the field is close to identifying it.