Free Online Values Card Sort

About the technique

A values card sort helps a person put words to what matters most by sorting a deck of values into piles and choosing a few to focus on. The Personal Values Card Sort was created by William Miller, Janet C’de Baca, Daniel Matthews and Paula Wilbourne at the University of New Mexico in 2001 (Miller et al., 2001). It is closely linked with motivational interviewing, where exploring values can bring out the gap between how a person is living and what they care about.

Values work appears across several therapies. In acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), clarifying values gives direction to committed action, and ACT as a package has good trial support across a range of mental and physical health problems (A-Tjak et al., 2015). Rating how fully each value is lived now makes the list actionable, as in the Bull’s-Eye Values Survey, which asks people to rate how consistently they act on what they value (Lundgren et al., 2012).

The card sort itself has little direct testing; it is a clinical tool used within well-supported approaches rather than an intervention trialed on its own. It suits adults and teens at many points in treatment, from engagement to relapse prevention. Values are chosen, not assigned, so avoid steering toward the right ones, and treat values held collectively, through family, culture or faith, as valid as individual choices. For a client in a depressive low, a large gap between values and current life can feel like another failure; frame it as direction, not a score.