A comparison between American and Japanese students' work values

A total of 724 American students completed the Work Aspects Preference Scale; 1212 Japanese students completed a Japanese translation of the same scale. All subjects were junior and senior high-school students. A full-factorial 2 × 2 × 2 multivariate analysis with main effects of country, gender, and grade level and the 13 subscales of the WAPS as dependent variables resulted in significant F values for all main and interaction effects, except the Country × Grade interaction. Subscale analyses revealed that American students had significantly higher scores (i.e., they rated the value as more important) than Japanese students on all subscales except Creativity; there were grade level differences on only 4 scales, but gender differences were found on 9 of the 13 subscales. Country × Gender interactions were interpreted with reference to sex-role stereotypes and recent findings on the mediating role of sex-role typing.