The theory of the human development, defended by R. Inglehart, postulates that a slow and gradual change in the individual priorities has been happening in world scale in the last decades. That alteration would be leading to the adoption of postmaterialistic values that emphasize the life quality and the self-expression as individual goals. The indexes built by that researcher to measure such priorities, however, had been object of several critics on their validity and consistence. In this article, is presented a group of tests involving those indexes for the specific Brazilian case, with the objective of contributing with that theoretical-methodological debate. Using data produced by the project World Values Survey and using different statistical techniques, the authors identified that the measures in subject present significant consistence in Brazilian context.
human development; postmaterialism; values; measures of values; R. Inglehart