Measuring Values

A famous quote from the world of business states, “What you can measure, you can manage.” This popular truism asserts that measurement allows people to make sophisticated decisions with considerable ease and precision. When something is measured, like cultural values, the measurement takes abstract ideas or concepts and turns them into numbers (also referred to as data), which can then be put into computer software programs like Excel, IBM SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences), or SAS (Statistical Analysis System). Once that is done, these software programs can be used to evaluate and analyze all sorts of interesting questions, like whether certain values are present among a group of people, whether members of one group hold those values to a greater or lesser degree ...