Between Collectivism and Individualism – Analysis of Changes in Value Systems of Students in the Period of 15 Years

INTRODUCTION: The publication deals with the description of selected aspect of young people’s mentality, ie their systems of values. The research was conducted four times: in 2003 (325 respondents), in 2008 (379 respondents), in 2013 (368 respondents), and in 2018 (371 respondents) on students of the Bialystok universities. An attempt was made to establish if in the period of the fifteen years between the first survey and the last surveys one could observe changes in the mentality in the desired direction – from the point of view of political transformations – from “collectivism” to “individualism”. The way of understanding values was adopted from Rokeach’s theory. METHODS: The Rokeach Value Survey was used to study the system of values. RESULTS: The comparative analysis of the value preferences indices across all surveys (survey by survey) has not confirmed proposed hypothesis. It has been shown that the value system has changed towards individualism over fifteen years (when comparing surveys from year 2003 and 2018). Contradictory to the expectations, the most individualistic system of values was presented in survey group in 2008, and not in 2018. CONCLUSION: There was no increase in rates of preference for individualistic values “from study to study”. The trajectories of changes in value systems turned out to be much more complex (and thus more difficult to describe).