Identifying The Content and Structure of Human Values in Iranian Students

alues, psychological structures that are internalized as a result of cultural, social, and personal experie- nces, have their own specific consequences. This research attempted to discover the structural and semantic relations of values among Iranian university students. 600 rando- mly selected university students, including 300 males and 300 females, from four schools of Islamic Azad Univer- sity South Branch, completed the Schwartz Value Survey (SVS). The Smallest Space Analysis (SSA) technique was applied to analyse the data about the structures and constellations of contents of values. Findings show that there is no sex differences in structural and semantic aspects of values, and the contents and structures of human values of Iranian youth widely overlap with the universal theoretical model of values, proposed by Schw- artz (1992). However, Iranian students’ type of achieve-ment values deviates from that of prototypical structure. The deviation can be explained in terms of such cultural characteristics of Iranians as adjustments of young adult to the political system, the ideological socialization in recent decades, and the influence of a two-hundred years period dispute between two conflicting forces, political reformism and traditionalism. The controversial findings of present research require further studies that apply other criteria to test the accuracy of the present explanations.