Educational Position and Moral–Civic Values among Tertiary-Educated Young Adults: A Bayesian Mundlak Analysis across 66 World Values Survey Samples
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Abstract
Higher education institutions have a dual purpose: to educate and to socialise moral and civic citizens. While this mandate is widely acknowledged, empirical studies of value formation are often limited to single-case studies or use concepts that are difficult to compare across national contexts. In this study, we propose and test a data-based model of moral and civic value formation using the World Values Survey (WVS) Wave 7. A sample of 9,589 tertiary-educated individuals aged from 18 to 30 in 66 countries was used for the analyses. We used a systematic pre-processing protocol to recode WVS special missing categories, exclude completely missing variables, and build six theoretically-informed, normalized indicators of prosocial values, achievement-responsibility values, moral rejection, institutional trust, gender-equitable education values and social trust. These were then combined into a formative Moral-Civic Value Formation Index (MCVFI). HC3 robust standard error regression models were estimated at the individual level and with country fixed effects. The individual-level model identified education level (β = 0.099, p < 0.001), female gender (β = 0.046, p < 0.001), and family-religious socialization (β = 0.267, p < 0.001) as significant positive predictors. Country fixed effects substantially improved model fit, raising adjusted R² from 0.084 to 0.306. This confirms that moral and civic value formation is context-sensitive and embedded in wider cultural-national environments. The study contributes a reproducible, open-data framework for integrating cross-national public values data into educational research on civic and moral development.
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