This study analyzes American, Vietnamese and Japanese personal values, attempting to understand how it can be ethnographers find large differences in values between cultures, yet empirical surveys find relatively small, almost trivial differences in personal values between cultures.Introduction The Conceptual Framework Questionnaire Construction The Organization of Values Similarities and Differences The Americans The Vietnamese The Japanese Institutionalized ValuesROY GOODWN D'ANDRADE?is Professor of Anthropology at the?University of Connecticut, USA.