Individual Values: A survey of the student body of engineering

Abstract

Personal values can influence actions, choices and human behaviors, interfering in the way that the individual judges yourself and others (GASTALDELLO, 1999).  Also, affect the career decisions of current and future professionals seeking entry into the labor market. This research has as main objective to perform an exploratory study with a group of engineering students, mostly belonging to Y Generation, in order to: 1) Identify the differences and similarities that can be found in relation to their personal values; 2) Verify that statistically there is an association between the two different types of personal values (instrumental and terminal) and the profile of this student body, considering the gender, age and educational base. The main theoretical approach was supported by the values of Rokeach (1981). The questionnaire was constructed in three parts: presentation, participant profile and scale of terminal and instrumental values. The data processing was done with the aid of the statistical package SPSS version 13.0, and the results organized into descriptive analysis and inferential analysis. Among the results, the order of importance is emphasized that the primary terminal value happiness is predominant (18% of respondents) followed by comfortable life (17%) and family safety (10%). It is observed that social recognition was the least incidence of terminal value in the opinion of students (1%). Regarding the primary instrumental value, in order of importance stand out honesty (18%), ambition (12%) and responsability (11%). The two instrumental values were less prioritized obedience (3%) and politeness (1%). Statistical tests for significance level of 5% determined that there is no direct association between different terminal values and instrumental values and other reference variables such as gender, age and education. The need to expand the sample space of this research and invest in future research to study the influence of personal values in professional inclination subsidies are important, here recommended for a better fit individual-organization.