Research techniques Many workers have used variations on Rokeach's list of terminal values, which subjects are asked to place in rank order. This procedure will be followed here. To include values corresponding to all of the evaluations of beliefs would have made the final instrument prohibitively long, since the number would amount to some dozens. They often express themselves using words and phrases referring to specific objects or people and when using abstract terms come up with a wide range of ideas. The Rokeach list used has been expanded to cater for this, a couple of items rephrased and the whole list has been shuffled.
Many youngsters mention material possessions as being important and desirable.
Although subjects completed value ranking tasks quickly and willingly and were willing to defend their responses in interviews, a number of problems were thrown up in the pilot work. Ranking of values seemed to vary with the position of an item and with which other items were adjacent to it, test-retest reliabilities were poor and the mean ranking of health varied between apparently similar groups of students when additional questions on smoking or drinking behaviour were or were not included. Subjects of this age range do not seem to have met this sort of task before and it is clear the validity of the replies may be low. The intrinsic interest of the rankings of 'health' and 'independence' is perhaps sufficiently great for them to be retained in a wider survey. In any event, the conclusion that there may be great scope for 'values clarification' would be of considerable general interest.