Young people use social values to judge pop stars, poll

Chinanews, Beijing, July 17 – The China Youth Daily Social Investigation Center and Tencent Information News recently carried out a survey about Chinese young people's attitudes towards pop stars. The survey shows that in choosing their favorite pop stars, most people focus on their talents (69.6%), next, or almost equally important, on their sense of social responsibility (69.4%), followed by their patriotism (65.9%), the love they display for the things they are doing (62.3%), and whether they are sympathetic to others (60.6%). Things like appearance are listed as one of the least important factors in people's choices for picking their favorite stars.
About 10,352 people took part in the survey, 95% of them under the age of 35.
“Whether a pop star will be liked by society or not depends on what he or she can bring to society. Although a person's ability plays an important part in it, other factors are equally important - what these stars do or say should conform with the main stream of social values,” a respondent said.
From this respondent's point of view, pop star might be different from one another in their personal styles; however, if they want other people to like them, they should have something in common: these include the sense of social responsibility, the sense of caring for public interests and a kind heart.
Only 9.3% of the respondents still think that traditional educational methods – which teach young people moral values by instilling ideas into them, still works. 51.8% of the people think that such methods might be out of date, although to some extent they are workable. 38.9% of the people think these methods become almost useless now.
On the other hand, celebrities and pop stars play an increasingly important role in helping young people to form their moral values.
In the survey, 39.5% of the respondents say they might be affected by celebrities or pop stars in forming their moral ideas; 26.1% of them hold that people's favorite celebrities, including pop stars, play the most important role in teaching adolescents about moral ideas. The percentage of people who favor pop stars in teaching young people about social values is only lower than those who pick up “parents” and higher than those who pick up “friends, classmates” and those who pick up “teachers”.
Although many of them think that many pop stars have too much rumours, still 54.7% of the respondents think that the most popular stars are those that have both talents and social responsibilities.