Should ratings of the importance of personal values be centered?

•The effects of using raw or centered ratings of personal values are studied.•Centered ratings lead to lower Stress and more circular value configurations in MDS.•Raw ratings require an extra dimension in unfolding to represent the persons’ means.•With raw ratings, the value circle emerges in a disk in 3d unfolding space.•Mean ratings can be substantively meaningful as value-guidedness.

Research on personal values is based on persons’ ratings of the importance of values. Typically, the means of these ratings are discarded as response style artifacts through centering the data, person by person. We show that centering leads to more circular value configurations with lower Stress in MDS than using raw data. For unfolding models, we show that using raw data avoids some special issues in unfolding; the model space requires one additional dimension; after appropriate rotations, the value circle emerges in a plane; the persons’ scattering about this plane corresponds to their mean ratings. The mean ratings correspond to the first principal component of the value items. It is demonstrated that mean ratings can also be substantively meaningful.