Attitudes, Beliefs, Intentions, and Metaphors Over Time and in Place

Chapter 6 provides the results from the descriptive and multivariate analyses of family member responses to attitude and belief questions regarding trust, redistributive justice, human capital investment, centrality of work, intentions to work, risk-taking, cooperative attitudes/intentions, and individual achievement. The importance of metaphorical meaning is also addressed. Employing ordinary least squares, binomial, and multinomial logit regressions, the authors find that trust, risk-taking, cooperative attitudes, and individual achievement are consequential in distinguishing families in Sweden, Italy, the United States, and India. They also find strong generational effects with millennials expressing significantly different attitudes and beliefs than those of their grandparents on redistributive justice, human capital investment, the centrality of work, risk-taking, and individual achievement. They find little evidence to support the utility of cultural metaphors, as defined by Gannon and associates, as an emic device to capture cultural value orientation.