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ABSTRACTDue to the explosive growth of social media technology worldwide, consumers are exposed to abundant stimuli across cultures that affect their internalization of societal ideal of beauty and the formation of self‐concept. In response to this, the beauty industry is facing challenges to personalize their offerings to an array of diverse consumers who are seeking brands that resonate with their values and foster a true emotional bond. Consumers' personal value with respect to beauty is an important antecedent of the internalization of societal ideal of beauty, which eventually control their appearance‐conscious emotions and behaviors, thereby play an important role for understanding the psychological mechanisms that underlie diverse beautification procedures. However, a systematic scale to measure personal beauty values of consumers across cultures has yet to be established. In this article, we attempt to bridge this gap by developing, measuring, and validating a new Personal Beauty Values Scale through a series of studies using independent samples from the United States (n = 348, n = 1039), the United Kingdom (n = 401, n = 396), Japan (n = 1011), and Denmark (n = 981). Subsequently, we investigate influences of personal beauty values on one of the critical beautification procedures invasive to the human body, that is, cosmetic surgery. Specifically, the nomological validation using the U.S. sample (n = 1039) demonstrated that the distinct characteristics of the five personal beauty values dimensions differently affected appearance‐conscious emotions such as shame and hubristic pride, thereby unveiling the psychological mechanism behind consideration of cosmetic surgery.

For decades, social scientists have been interested in studying individual attitudes toward ethnic minorities or immigrants and their development over time. Whereas these attitudes have been commonly studied among adults, little is known about children's and teenager's attitudes toward immigrant minorities. This gap might have been a result of a lack of standardized, cost-effective, and efficient large-scale survey measures tailored to young people. In the current study, we try to overcome this gap by introducing and validating a new, child-friendly, easily administrable picture-based survey measure of attitudes toward immigrants belonging to two ethnic minorities: blacks and Muslims. For this purpose, we collected a panel dataset at three measurement time points in two countries, Switzerland and Poland, including 5332 school children and teenagers aged 8 to 19 years, divided into three age cohorts. We performed confirmatory factor analyses within and across the samples and found that the new picture-based measures were reliable and highly comparable across measurement time points, age cohorts, and country samples. The findings suggest that picture-based measures may be a promising tool to measure attitudes among children.+++Correction to: Measuring school children's attitudes toward immigrants in Switzerland and Poland, s. https://doi.org/10.1186/s42409-021-00024-9 (14 April 2021).

Immigration has been one of the most crucial global phenomena, changing the fabric of many societies, and a topic of substantial research. Much of this research has focused on how the host society views immigrants and immigration, or on the societal factors influencing the latter. The goal of this thematic issue is to present different studies focusing on various aspects of immigration from a perspective that has not been often viewed under the magnifying glass so far, but which is of major importance: looking at immigration from the immigrants' point of view.

"Schwartz' theory of ten basic human values has stimulated numerous studies using a variety of instruments. Confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) of the properties of some of the instruments have revealed that three pairs of values were excessively highly correlated. This led Davidov et al. (2008) to propose unifying values. To overcome the problems of loss of precision due to unifying distinct values, Knoppen and Saris (2009a, b) investigated the factorial structure of each of the ten values measured with the PVQ (Schwartz et al. 2001). They identified both cross-loadings and distinct sub-dimensions for the pairs of nondiscriminated values in two German student samples. They concluded that the original strategy for selecting items, maximizing theoretical coverage at the expense of item homogeneity, produced the poor discrimination between values. The Study 1 examines whether the Knoppen and Saris findings generalize to a representative sample of the German population. With some notable exceptions, the author's findings replicate theirs. Study 2 uses 33 items from an experimental version of the PVQ to operationalize and test a full model of the 11 basic values. Following Knoppen and Saris, they included only one sub-dimension of each of the 11 values. This CFA model yielded a satisfactory fit with no estimation problems. The authors conclude that available indicators permit measuring the distinct values without the need to collapse factors. Limitations and implications of the research are discussed." (author's abstract)

Zusammenfassung: In zwei Stichproben wird eine deutschsprachige 40-Item Version des "Portraits Value Questionnaire" (PVQ) validiert; in einer dritten Stichprobe (European Social Survey) wird eine verkürzte Version mit 21 Items dieses Werteinventars validiert. Bei dem PVQ handelt es sich um ein von Shalom Schwartz neu entwickeltes Instrument zur Überprüfung seiner Theorie grundlegender menschlicher Werte. Die Aufgabenstellung des PVQ unterscheidet sich konzeptionell deutlich von der des bisher verwendeten Standardinstrumentes "Schwartz Value Survey" (SVS). Das neue Instrument ist besonders für Probanden mit mittlerer und niedriger Schulbildung geeignet. Unsere Ergebnisse belegen die instrumentenunabhängige Validität der von Schwartz postulierten Wertetheorie. Der Vergleich mit dem SVS belegt die konvergente und diskriminante Validität der mit dem PVQ gemessenen zehn Wertetypen. Auch die vorhergesagten Beziehungen der Wertetypen mit zwei externen Konstrukten belegen die Konstruktvalidität des PVQ. In einer konfirmatorischen Faktorenanalyse wird die postulierte Zahl der unterschiedlichen Werte nicht bestätigt, da neun statt zehn Werte als empirisch angemessen erscheinen. Eine externe Validierung mit den Daten des repräsentativen European Social Survey in Deutschland durch eine konfirmatorische Faktorenanalyse (jedoch nur mit 21 Items) hat die Schwartz'sche Werteskala weitgehend bestätigt, allerdings mussten sechs der zehn Wertetypen zu dreien zusammengefasst werden.

It is necessary to test for equivalence of measurements across groups to guarantee that comparisons of regression coefficients or mean scores of a latent factor are meaningful. Unfortunately, when tested, many scales display nonequivalence. Several researchers have suggested that nonequivalence may be used as a useful source of information as to why equivalence is biased and proposed employing a multilevel structural equation modeling (MLSEM) approach to explain why equivalence is not given. This method can consider a latent between-level factor and/or single contextual variables and use them to explain items' nonequivalence. In the current study, we show that this method may also be useful for social science studies in general and for survey research and sociological comparative studies in particular when one fails to establish cross-group equivalence. We utilize data from the International Social Survey Program national identity module (2003) to test for the cross-country equivalence of a scale measuring attitudes toward granting citizenship rights to immigrants. As expected, the scale fails to achieve scalar equivalence. However, we explain a significant part of the most nonequivalent intercept by a latent between-level factor and one contextual variable, namely, the percentage of foreigners in the country relying on group threat theory. We show that the method does not necessarily rectify nonequivalence, but it can help to explain why it is absent.

AbstractValues—the motivational goals that define what is important to us—guide our decisions and actions every day. Their importance is established in a long line of research investigating their universality across countries and their evolution from childhood to adulthood. In adolescence, value structures are subject to substantial change, as life becomes increasingly social. Value change has thus far been understood to operate independently within each person. However, being embedded in various social systems, adolescents are constantly subject to social influence from peers. Thus, we introduce a framework investigating the emergence and evolution of value priorities in the dynamic context of friendship networks. Drawing on stochastic actor-oriented network models, we analyze 73 friendship networks of adolescents. Regarding the evolution of values, we find that adolescents' value systems evolve in a continuous cycle of internal validation through the selection and enactment of goals—thereby experiencing both congruence and conflicts—and external validation through social comparison among their friends. Regarding the evolution of friendship networks, we find that demographics are more salient for the initiation of new friendships, whereas values are more relevant for the maintenance of existing friendships.

Social networking sites have become a predominant means of communication across the globe. Activities on these sites generate massive amounts of personal information and raise concerns about its potential abuse. Means designed to protect the user's privacy and prevent exploitation of confidential data often go unused. In this study, we draw on the theory of planned behavior, a reasoned action approach, to explain intentions to adopt privacy behaviors on social networking sites, with a focus on Twitter users. Consistent with the theory, an online survey of Twitter users ( n = 1,060) found that instrumental and experiential attitudes and descriptive and injunctive subjective norms regarding these behaviors were direct predictors of intentions. Perceived behavioral control had a moderating effect, such that subjective norm was a better predictor of intentions for participants high as opposed to low in perceived control. We briefly discuss the implications of these results for developing theory-driven and evidence-based interventions to promote privacy behavior.

Welzel et al. (2021) claim that non-invariance of instruments is inconclusive and inconsequential in the field for cross-cultural value measurement. In this response, we contend that several key arguments on which Welzel et al. (2021) base their critique of invariance testing are conceptually and statistically incorrect. First, Welzel et al. (2021) claim that value measurement follows a formative rather than reflective logic. Yet they do not provide sufficient theoretical arguments for this conceptualization, nor do they discuss the disadvantages of this approach for validation of instruments. Second, their claim that strong inter-item correlations cannot be retrieved when means are close to the endpoint of scales ignores the existence of factor-analytic approaches for ordered-categorical indicators. Third, Welzel et al. (2021) propose that rather than of relying on invariance tests, comparability can be assessed by studying the connection with theoretically related constructs. However, their proposal ignores that external validation through nomological linkages hinges on the assumption of comparability. By means of two examples, we illustrate that violating the assumptions of measurement invariance can distort conclusions substantially. Following the advice of Welzel et al. (2021) implies discarding a tool that has proven to be very useful for comparativists.