A Five-Factor Model of Values: An Exploratory Analysis of Russian-Language Value Words

This study used exploratory factor analysis to recover the factor structure of a Russian-language set of 70 value words and to compare it with established models of values. The approach rests on the lexical method, which derives structure from meaningful words in natural language. In personality research it has produced models such as the Big Five, but it has rarely been applied to values, and no Russian-language psycholexical studies of values are known to us. This work is not a full implementation of the lexical method, which would require a much broader range of words, so its results should be regarded as preliminary. The words were selected with reference to Schwartz's model of basic values and to a socionics-based semantic model from popular psychology. Each word was rated on a five-point importance scale by N = 369 respondents who visited a thematic website about popular personality typologies. Factors were extracted with varimax rotation, and anchor words were selected for each factor. The analysis yielded five factors: Influence, Closeness, Material Well-Being, Stability, and Creativity. The stability of the solution was tested by resampling words and bootstrapping respondents. Closeness, Stability, and Creativity were stable under these tests, whereas Influence and Material Well-Being were less stable. The factors were then tentatively compared with Schwartz's model of basic values, socionics-based aspects, the cross-cultural lexical model of values by De Raad et al. (2016), the PINT model by Wilkowski et al. (2020), and Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Further research should test the model on a broader lexicon and a wider range of respondents.