Parent-Child Value Similarity Across and Within Cultures

Normative socio-cultural influences may lead to parent-child value similarity over and above familial processes. Such influences, in which the mainstream position taken by people in a given culture leads to an average similarity between unrelated members of the culture, have been investigated for the most part by considering one country at a time. This has, however, left several questions open; among these is the question of whether parent-child value similarity is a matter of societal homogeneity in values. In an attempt to answer this query, the current study intends to examine the effect of the national and ethnic normative profiles, that is, groups' average profiles, on parent-child value similarity, while assuming a cross-cultural perspective. It involves 212 mother-adolescent dyads from Northern Italy and 222 Jewish and Arab mother-adolescent dyads from Israel, all participants in the Value of Children (VOC) Study. In the more homogeneous value context of Italy, parent-child value similarity was strongly inflated by the broad socio-cultural context and can best be viewed as a general similarity to a national standard. On the contrary, in the less homogeneous context of Israel, when accounting for the effects of normative profiles, there was still similarity unique to a particular dyad: Mothers and children, especially from the Arab group, were similar to each other in those values which distinguish them from the other people in the country. All in all, the results help us to disentangle the origins and to interpret the actual meaning of detected parent-child value similarity.