An Interview Study On Subjective Concepts Of Social Development Based On Intrinsic Value Account

An effective and comprehensive social-evaluation is an important means helps us inthe analysis of social problems and making public policies. With the domestic and globalsocial problems emerge, those complex interactions behind each social development factorslet people realize that single-target policies will hinder the realization of many social valuesat the same time they achieve some short-term goals. As a widely discussed topic in ethicsand sociology study, intrinsic value could unify the diverse interests of all the sciences suchas economic growth and environment protection, and give an explanation of them from thevalue-level. Social development is a concept with strong but implicit ethical assumption,and all of its elements have intrinsic values that are worthy of people’s pursuit. In this study,an Intrinsic Value Account (IVA) is constructed as a new social evaluation system byunderline the universality and the essential of intrinsic value, and the enhancement andweakening of some intrinsic values could be shown. Besides, this study believes that manyof these values are plural and incomparable.The main method of this intrinsic value account pilot research is in-depth interview,which is cooperated with modified Likert scale. In this study, we select15persons in a985university as our interviewees—all of them are post-graduate students or those who got ahigher degree. This study devotes to know these interviewees’ subjective views of socialdevelopment or, in another word, their social cognition in intrinsic value level, and thengive a priority order of some value-conflicted social elements, and finally get arepresentative description of one social evaluation. In the face-to-face investigation, most ofthe interviewees emphasize the intrinsic values of national security and social equity, butrelatively, they see cultural undertakings in a lower value level. As for the important topic—sustainable development, or in another word, weighing the intrinsic values ofenvironmental goods—we find that respondents have different understandings and theoverall cognition has not reached the theory expectation.This is the first time of intrinsic value concept’s application in social evaluation, andits practical implication is that IVA could be a practical instrument to evaluate socialdevelopment and clarify some possible academic controversies on it. This study is to makepeople, especially policy makers, deeply ponder their value assumption, value priority andsome basic concepts of development, and to help them find the evidence of the cause ofsocial problems and the trend of social change.