10/15/2005

Linking Values and Attitudes

I went to the Mountain Plains Management Conferences and listened to Jerry Geisler. He has done an incredible amount of research on linking values, attitudes and behavior. He made a few points that I thought were interesting during his presentation. Some of his research has concluded that the presence of a father in the home predicts success to the whole family rather than if the family has an education. I think that is somewhat true. I have a lot of friends that have come from a broken home and they seem lost and confused about what to do with their future. He has also studied the differences in the terminal and instrumental values between men and women. I thought that this was very interesting. Women and men have pretty much the same values when it comes to their families, but somewhat different values when it comes to worldly issues.
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1 comment:

Dr. Tufte said...

Taylor - I wish you had told the others what you meant by "terminal" and "instrumental".

There is a big which-came-first-the-chicken-or-the-egg problem here.

Are families successful because the father is there, or are successul families more likely to include fathers who won't bug out at the first sign of trouble?

I did not see this paper, but a lot of recent evidence suggests that it isn't how the parents raise their children that is important but rather what sort of people the parents already are by the time they have children. That would tend to suggest that pre-fathers who will end up with successful families probably have acquired the skills to make the whole thing work out well in advance.

2:58 PM

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