The importance of personal values has usually been investigated by ranking or by rating procedures. We used an alternative approach in a series of online studies: Subjects received a total of 45 graded paired comparison tasks. On each trial, two of the ten value types proposed by Schwartz (1992) were presented. Subjects were asked to indicate the degree to which one value type is more important than the other. To validate this approach, the resulting importance scores were correlated with scores from an online version of Schwartz' Portrait Values Questionnaire (PVQ). In addition, structural analyses, including a "weak-confirmatory" MDS approach, were conducted to examine whether and to what extent data from the paired comparison task match Schwartz' assumptions about the structure of human values. The central findings of these analyses are presented.