Topical Agenda for the Study of Values in Foreign Sociology: Topics, Theories, Methodologies

Abstract

Research on values is important both for the development of sociology and for. practices of social management, they provide the necessary basis for effective public policy.The purpose of this article was to analyze the current agenda for the study of values by building theoretical and methodological thematic clusters. An optional task was to describe the thematic thesaurus used by the authors of the articles on values. The hypothesis was tested that the theory of social status in relation to economic topics received the greatest recognition in the current agenda. The study was carried out in a quantitative design, the method of content analysis was used, followed by the calculation of the c-correlation coefficient between the three semantic components of the study: topic, theory, methodology. The empirical material was the abstracts of 132 articles published in 21 sociological journals, included in the 1 quartile of Scopus in 2016–2020. Articles were selected according to the author’s search method. The limitations of the study are the 5-year time period, the language of the article (English), the use of only abstract texts for analysis, and not the articles themselves, the author’s method of building clusters (it is possible to build clusters on other grounds).Results. The main hypothesis was confirmed. The strongest connection was recorded between the theory of social status and economic topics (c-correlation coefficient — 0.62). The smallest connection was found between family values and theories about values as ideal representations (0.21). At the same time, the coefficient of connection between theories and research topics is, on average, lower than that of methodologies and topics. Qualitative methodology is mentioned by authors of articles on values a little more often than quantitative one. (114 qualitative versus 103 quantitative). In the thematic thesaurus, the greatest diversity is recorded in the research area “Labor and Economics”, the least — in the areas “Family” and “Education”. Despite the fact that the group of articles dealing with values in the sphere of politics is the second largest in the sample with 87 articles (66%), only 15 frequently used terms were included in its thematic thesaurus. In the area of “Labor and Economics”, 65 significant terms were identified; in total, materials of 111 articles (84%) were attributed to this area.The directions of further researchare related to the study of the isomorphism of the agenda for the study of values in international and Russian sociology, as well as the analysis of substantive discrepancies in the study of values in the same sphere of life between Russian and foreign sociologists.