Value Orientations of Highly Educated Migrants from Serbia

Abstract

International migration of the highly educated has always been a characteristic of academia, however, specifi c circumstances in the Balkans in recent years, marked by wars and economic crisis, have additionally contributed to a large outfl ow of highly educated people from Serbia. Th e aim of this study was to identify value systems among the highly educated migrants from Serbia. Living in extremely complex social situations, having to speak two or more languages and being adapted to living in diff erent cultures, diff erent political and social environments might infl uence migrants' value systems. For this purpose, a questionnaire has been constructed consisting of standardized scales-Value Orientation Scale (Kuzmanović 1995), Postmaterialism Scale (Inglehart 2000), and Social Distance Scale (Bogardus 1933). Our sample consisted of 327 highly educated emigrants who responded to an online survey. Th e results show that our sample characterizes expressed openness to the world, equality of genders, secular-rational and self-expression values. On the other hand, lower levels of conformism, religiousness, authoritarianism and social distance are detected. Our assumption is that the results obtained may be a consequence of the migrant lifestyle and in this regard are consistent with the new approach in the study of migration-transnationalism.