Adolescents’ and Parents’ Perceptions About Core Values to Individual and Family Life: A Cross- Sectional Study Involving Seven European Countries
Adolescents’ and Parents’ Perceptions About Core Values to Individual and Family Life: A Cross- Sectional Study Involving Seven European Countries

Summary/Abstract: Family, community and school are privileged contexts to acquire andconsolidate fundamental values for governing individual life andinterpersonal relations across lifespan, and such learning is more effective ifthere is congruence in the messages learned, and if children and adolescentsare stimulated to develop critical thinking competences to deal withinformation. Involving a convenience sample of 889 subjects, 446adolescents and 443 parents from seven European countries to whom a self-administered questionnaire was applied, this paper presents the main resultsEuropean Journal of Educational Sciences, EJES December 2016 edition Vol.3, No.4 ISSN 1857- 603628of cross-comparisons between and within countries about the perceivedimportance of values for family. Participants were also asked to do a self-evaluation of themselves as models of citizenship for others. Overall,mothers tend to consider that values are more promoted in families thanfathers, but there are no differences in the opinions of adolescent boys andgirls. When males and females are compared with no distinction ofgenerations, the latter agreed more with the significance of values for thefamily than the former. There are some specific differences between andwithin countries and sample groups in the evaluation of values and self-perceptions of citizenship performance. Despite the limited number ofparticipants in each country, the discussion of results highlights theimportance of debating the values that guide personal and societal principlesinside and outside the family, in an effort to construct a world free ofprejudice and discrimination and where every person, regardless of cultural,religious or ethnical identities, is invited to contribute to the common well-being.

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