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Issue 11, vol. 2 - July 2006 Look Ma, No Massive Value Shifts!
At least every two years we at Youthography integrate a proprietary tool called the “valumeter” into one of our national surveys. This tool, involving a robust set of about 50 attitudes to, or attributes of, life is designed to give us all a current and reality-based snapshot of the way young Canadians prioritize or, at the very least, want to be seen as prioritizing, a whole whack of wildly divergent psychographic criteria. The big story from our just recently fielded wave, as the title of this missive alludes to, is that there have been no significantly strong aggregate value shifts across the board since our last fully national fielding of the valumeter. This is not surprising; most macro values take quite a while to morph and change but many can and do….eventually. Young Canadians continue to place a large amount of topbox importance on developing trust, developing themselves and planning quite pragmatically for their future. Meanwhile, sex and drugs, rock and roll and popularity (longtime staples of how older generations often generically refer to their younger counterparts) are not seen, by in large, as fundamentally important to a young Canadian’s life. Of course, young Canadians aren’t dropping their joints, sex and beer to run off to a local skills development symposium nor are they totally disinterested in being with any type of “in” crowd (particularly teens) but what’s really important here is, as always, the context. For instance, as the macro trend we like to refer to as “hedonormalization” (the normalization of sex, drugs and vice within mainstream cultural discourse) continues to grow. Today’s younger Canadians see sex, drugs and vice as common activities and not activities they feel they need to wear as some sort of badge. The “whatever” factor is in full effect here. Similarly, a whole array of different demographic and technological factors (i.e. less siblings per family, more time on their own, creating their own virtual micro-communities, creating their own media) have continued to create a true sense of independence and an “it’s mostly up to me” attitude amongst our younger generations that steadily feed all the top value sets we find here. Top Values Among 14 to 29-Year-Olds: 
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