“Do not leave your values at home”: A study of value orientations of Italian emerging adults and their parents

The aims of this work, involving 184 emerging adults and both their parents, recruited through universities and worker cooperatives and factories located in northern Italy, were to: (1) compare the emerging adults' and their parents' values to uncover gender and generational specificities; (2) measure value similarities between each emerging adult and his/her parents and between the two parents; and (3) examine the importance of family relationship quality as accounting for value similarities. Participants filled out the Portrait Values Questionnaire and the Network of Relationship Inventory (3 subscales). Anovas, correlations and dominance analyses were run on data. The results revealed both gender-related and intergenerational differences in the importance attributed to values. Within family dyads, on average a moderate degree of similarity was found between each emerging adult's value profile and his/her own father’s and mother’s value profiles, but lower than those between father and mother. The family relationship quality explained only a small proportion of variance of parent-child value similarities and slightly larger of mother-father value similarity. Implications of the results for transmission of values and their possible developments are discussed.