Study On The Postgraduates' Life Values: Questionnaire And Actuality

With the continuous development and progress of the society, people's living standard improves constantly. However, the phenomenon of ignoring and injuring life emerges in an endless stream, which gains recognition and causes meditation in educational field, universities even in the whole society. Objectively, one important reason causing this phenomenon is that the person doesn't form a positive life values. As a wildly concerned group, the postgraduates are highly educated and possess highly social expectation. Nonetheless, due to their limitations characteristics, such as lacking social life, large age range, multi-disciplinary learning, etc, this group is more prone to having some serious psychological problems.Researches of life values at home and abroad are limited, and most of them only are concerned with college students. There is no unified definition and criteria about life values and their structures. The measuring tools about life values are also lacking, and their reliability and validity need to be checked. Based on views of the above, this study focuses on the following issues:developing a life values questionnaire meeting with postgraduates'status; analyzing general characteristics and the differences in demographic variables of postgraduates on life values.Based on literature review, we put forward an operational definition of life values from psychological aspect:the individual gradually forms standard system of evaluation and selection to phenomenon of life, death and especially their meanings from ones own needs during growing process, which is a multi-dimensional psychological system. This research uses interviews and questionnaires to study postgraduates'Life Values. First, through 104 Southwest University postgraduates'open questionnaires, and further interviews with 10 of them, we get the preliminary ideas of life values and form the original questionnaire. We receive the preliminary life values test by surveying in a small range (317 Southwest University postgraduates), item analysis, and exploratory factor analysis. Then we use the initial questionnaire to investigate a wide range of masters(837 valid questionnaires were collected), and all the data are randomly divided into two parts, one is for Exploratory Factor Analysis, and the other is for the Confirmatory Factor Analysis (including reliability and validity testing and Model goodness of fit test). Ultimately we get a formal questionnaire containing 22 items. The statistical analysis results show that the questionnaire is reliable and valid.According to correlation analysis, t-test, ANOVA and LSD multiple comparisons etc, we get the following conclusions:1. The postgraduates'life values are a multi-level and multi-dimensional psychological structure, which includes self-realization, continuation, termination, social rewards, inaction and hedonism.2. The postgraduates'life values questionnaire which is based on theoretical structure possesses high reliability, validity, and could be used as a measuring tool.3. The results of this questionnaire of the investigation for 837 postgraduates indicate that some demographic variables (such as parents relationships,economic conditions and only child) have significant differences on some dimensions. But overall, postgraduates'scores in all dimensions are more than 3 points higher than the average. In short, postgraduates appear to have diversity and differences on life values scale.In theory, life values are divided into six dimensions in this study which enrich the domestic research in psychological field. Also, this research emphasizes the combination of theoretical and empirical studies in approach. In other words, we not only form good reliability and validity of measurement tools, but also analyze postgraduates'life values characteristics. However, many problems still need to be further improved and solved.