EN
The article deals with the ethnological research of the value orientations during the 1970s and 1980s in Slovakia, which presented one of the first attempts to overstep the limitations of the prevailing descriptive approach. The author discusses the contents of the contemporary scientific essays in the context of the methodological inspirations, definitions of the main concepts, traditional morality, value hierarchy etc. Despite the fact that the study of the value orientations in the period of the communist totalitarian regime was limited by the methodological asymmetry and by the censorship or auto-censorship, the empirical - and also partly general - aspect of the contemporary scientific works remains. This fact enabled the continuation of some aspects of the retrospective and recent research of the values and the value orientations in the new democratic conditions during the 1990s.