This dissertation is centrally concerned with exploring obituaries as repositories of values. Obituaries are a publicly-available natural language source that are variably written for members of communities that are wide (nation-level) and narrow (city-level, or at the level of specific groups therein). Because they are explicitly summative, limited in size, and written for consumption by a public audience, obituaries may be expected to express concisely the aspects of their subjects' lives that the authors (often family members living in the same communities) found most salient or worthy of featuring. 140,599 obituaries nested in 832 newspapers from across the USA were scraped with permission from *Legacy.com,* an obituaries publisher. Obituaries were coded for the age at death and gender (female/male) of the deceased using automated algorithms. For each publishing newspaper, county-level median income, educational achievement (operationalized as percent of the population with a Bachelor's degree or higher), and race and ethnicity were averaged across counties, weighting by population size. A Neo4J graph database was constructed using WordNet and the University of South Florida Free Association Norms datasets. Each word in each obituary in the corpus was lemmatized. The shortest path through the WordNet graph from each lemma to 30 Schwartz value prototype words published by Bardi, Calogero, and Mullen (2008) was then recorded. From these path lengths, a new measure, "word-by-hop," was calculated for each Schwartz value to reflect the relative lexical distance between each obituary and that Schwartz value. Of the Schwartz values, Power, Conformity, and Security were most indicated in the corpus, while Universalism, Hedonism, and Stimulation were least indicated. A series of nine two-level regression models suggested that, across Schwartz values, newspaper community accounted for the greatest amount of word-by-hop variability in the corpus. The best-fitting model indicated a small, negative effect of female status across Schwartz values. Unexpectedly, Hedonism and Conformity, which had conceptually opposite prototype words, were highly correlated, possibly indicating that obituary authors "compensate" for describing the deceased in a hedonistic way by concurrently emphasizing restraint. Future research could usefully further expand word-by-hop and incorporate individual-level covariates that match the newspaper-level covariates used here.

Shalom Schwartz invented the theory of Basic Human Values in 1987 – based on a study in which the quantitative data he collected, had been organised within an obscure manner. His theory has been validated and positioned as the universal way all individuals organise their values on a personal and cultural level, and has been researched in over 70 countries. South African researchers have however found significant challenges in replicating Schwartz's model within this multi-cultural society, and have ascribed the difficulties to ‘unintended item biases' within Schwartz's measurement instruments. This has been observed when utilising two different measurement instruments, as well as when further assessing ‘finer' sub-value types. A viable quantitative trend in utilising non-verbal assessment techniques has emerged, but has not been adapted for adults yet. In addition, Schwartz's theory has largely only been explored from a quantitative perspective, since its inception in 1987. Only four qualitative studies could be traced within Values-research which all highlighted a different way values were constructed and ordered, through utilising psycho-lexical research methodology. This type of research methodology does not necessarily highlight the effect of socio-economic and educational disparities within its participant's constructions, which Schwartz' highlighted a possible effect within South African research efforts. This study utilised a Social Constructionist approach known as Foucauldian Discourse Analysis to assist in deconstructing the ecology of values-talk from South African participants' linguistic expressions. Four focus group discussions were conducted across four different racial groups (White; Black; Indian and Coloured), as a means for unlocking the different discourses which govern the different ways in which South Africans ‘talk' about personal values. The analysis uncovered five different discourses which were activated and replicated throughout discussions – when constructing values which embraced participants socio-economic and educational positions. These discourses seemed to function in a complimentary and opposing nature at times, depending on the value being discussed. These constructions were compared to Schwartz's Basic Human Values model, and similarities and differences in constructions were discussed. In addition, the research findings were scrutinised to see how they could inform future qualitative research efforts to further explore how Schwartz's Basic Human Values model is ‘lived'. Finally, the study discusses its limitations and various considerations researchers would need to employ, when considering applying non-verbal assessment methodology within an abstract topic like values. / Dissertation (MCom)--University of Pretoria, 2017. / Human Resource Management / MCom / Unrestricted