VALUE ELICITATION - IS THERE ANYTHING IN THERE

Eliciting people's values is a central pursuit in many areas of the social sciences, including survey research, attitude research, economics, and behavior decision theory. These disciplines differ considerably in the core assumptions they make about the nature of the values that are available for elicitation. These assumptions lead to very different methodological concerns and interpretations, as well as to different risks of reading too much or too little into people's responses. The analysis here characterizes these assumptions and the research paradigms based on them. It also offers an account of how they arise, rooted in the psychological and sociological contexts within which different researchers function.