In a related study, Yu and Wu (1985) investigated the impact of
unemployment and stress among unemployed Chinese Americans.
The inability of the unemployed workers to provide support for
aging relatives was a primary source of dissatisfaction among those
studied. This result supports the proposition that individuals with a
collective social value are oriented to their families and provides
indirect support for the idea that the family may influence job sat-
isfaction to a greater degree for people who hold a collective social
value than for people who value individualism. Direct tests of this
hypothesis are needed before conclusions can be drawn, however.
Research on the Theory
Dorval (1999) explored the importance of relational values in
women’s career roles. She administered the Life Values Inventory to
a sample of ninety-eight female students drawn from four different
faculties (thirty-one from engineering, seventeen from science ex-
cept biology, eighteen from social work, and thirty-two from nurs-
ing) at the University of Calgary. Not surprisingly, concern for others
was the most important work value held by women in traditional
majors (nursing and social work), followed by achievement, respon-
sibility, and financial prosperity. Achievement, responsibility, in-
dependence, and financial prosperity were the most highly ranked
work values for women in nontraditional majors. Although this
research supports the idea that occupations are chosen on the basis
of work values, it failed to support the classification system devel-
oped by D. Brown (1996b) suggesting that creativity would be one
of the work values of engineers, social workers, and nurses and that
scientific understanding would be important to people in engineer-
ing and the sciences. This study is currently being replicated in Aus-
tralia with a broader sample and, if the results support Dorval’s
findings, revisions of the classification system will be needed.
Jepsen (1998) conducted a study that directly tested the major
hypothesis of this theory, namely, that work values are an important
THE ROLE OF WORK VALUES AND CULTURAL VALUES 487