Social values that ASEAN’s children can be encouraged today: A descriptive study based on six countries

Abstract

Nowadays, many studies indicate that parents play a crucial role in transmitting social values to their children, shaping certain standards for decision-making in their offspring. Drawing on the secondary data from the World Values Survery conducted from 2017 to 2022, this article extracts data from several countries in Southeast Asia (including Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Thailand, Singapore, and Vietnam) regarding the social values, which children should be encouraged to learn from their families. The processed data reveals the top 5 values selected by respondents are: 1) good manners, 2) responsibility, 3) tolerance and respect for others people, 4) independence, and 5) hard work. Furthermore, by using the Chi-Square technique, this study compares evaluations based on several socio-demographic characteristics. The results show that national factors differ statistically significantly across all 11 measured aspects, while living area and marital status only respond to 8 out of 11 items, and the number of children in the family shows the least difference in distribution. The findings from this article provide a robust foundation for developing population development policies, particularly targeting children in Southeast Asia in general and Vietnam in particular. Additionally, the article suggests avenues for Vietnamese’s researches major in family and gender to explore leveraging data from the World Values Survey organization to analyze social value issues at the national and regional levels.