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Lifestyle Segmentation 273

Anyway, these criticisms made us engage in a rather compelling project:
developing a value inventory ourselves, in order to use this for studying lifestyles.

Developing the value questionnaire

To develop a new value inventory, we followed two different approaches, com-
plementing one another.
First, we took a quota sample of the Flemish population between 18 and
65 years old (N = 236). Each was asked to formulate some 20 desires. This provided
us with a set of 4312 desires. Now, these desires can be regarded as expressions
of underlying personal values. Values being very abstract, desires being very
concrete, people find it easier to formulate desires than to express their values.
Analysing these desires could thus lead us to a new value inventory. Using qual-
itative content analysis, we arrived at an inventory of 27 values.
A second approach started with 80 students formulating all kinds of possible
values. This yielded a list of 981 values. Again, using qualitative content analysis,
this list was reduced to a set of 124 values. These were then administered to a
quota sample of the Flemish population between 18 and 65 years old (N = 672).
Factor analysis (alpha factoring and oblimin rotation) yielded 26 factors (global
values) explaining 66 percent of variance.
The results of both research projects were then merged, which led us to a value
inventory of 35 values, including such things as:

• Being respected and appreciated by others;
• Wisdom;
• Joy and pleasure, having fun in life;
• Leading a simple and modest life;
• Good health, being healthy;
• Safety, living in a safe world;

and so on. The complete questionnaire is available upon request from the author.
In the final questionnaire, respondents were asked to indicate on a seven-point
scale how important each value was in their lives.
However, we did not take the value concept as our sole way of constructing
a lifestyle typology. We added two different approaches, without, however,
returning to the burdensome, extremely ad hoc and very intuitive AIO approach.

Adding the concept of life visions

The value concept being very broad and general, we wanted to add a second
section that was more concrete and specific, something which had to do with
societal trends, the general issues that underlie AIO constructs, the way people
‘look at life’. We call this ‘life visions’. Life visions then can be defined as the per-
spective people take on some major issues in life. We drew up a list of 20 items