World Values Survey

The World Values Survey is a worldwide investigation of sociocultural and political change. It is conducted by a network of social scientist at leading universities all around world. Interviews have been carried out with nationally representative samples of the publics of more than 80 societies on all six inhabited continents. A total of four waves have been carried out since 1981 making it possible to carry out reliable global cross-cultural analyses and analysis of changes over time.

The World Values Survey has produced evidence of gradual but pervasive changes in what people want out of life. Moreover, the survey shows that the basic direction of these changes is, to some extent, predictable.

This project is being carried out by an international network of social scientists, with local funding for each survey (though in some cases, it has been possible to raise supplementary funds from outside sources). In exchange for providing the data from interviews with a representative national sample of at least 1,000 people in their own society, each participating group gets immediate access to the data from all of the other participating societies. Thus, they are able to compare the basic values and beliefs of the people of their own society with those of more than 60 other societies. In addition, they are invited to international meetings at which they can compare findings and interpretations with other members of the WVS network.

The project is guided by a steering committee representing all regions of the world. The World Values Survey data have become increasingly well-known in recent years, and have been utilized in hundreds of publications in more than twenty languages; an incomplete list appears in the publications section. These data have also been used extensively in graduate seminars and for instructional purposes more broadly. For example, Russell Dalton's second edition of Citizen Politics includes a subset of these data in a computer-based instructional unit. The Micro Case corporation has also made extensive use of the WVS data in four textbooks with computer-based instructional units: American Government (5th ed.); in Discovering Sociology, published in 1999; in Cultural Anthropology, published in 1998; and in Comparative Politics: An Introduction Using Explorit, published in 2002. According to MicroCase, over 50,000 students per year use WVS data in connection with these textbooks.

The Origins of the World Values Surveys

The World Values Surveys grew out of a study launched by the European Values Survey group (EVS) under the leadership of Jan Kerkhofs and Ruud de Moor in 1981. The EVS carried out surveys in ten West European societies; it evoked such widespread interest that it was replicated in 14 additional countries.

Findings from these surveys suggested that predictable cultural changes were taking place. To monitor these changes, a new wave of surveys was launched, this time designed to be carried out globally, with Ronald Inglehart coordinating the surveys outside Western Europe. Coherent patterns of change were observed from 1981 to 1990, with a wide range of key values. To monitor these changes and probe more deeply into their causes and consequences, the group agreed to carry out additional waves of research in 1995 and 2000; and began designing the 1995 wave. This wave was designed to give special attention to obtaining better coverage of non-Western societies and analyzing the development of a democratic political culture in the emerging Third Wave democracies.

Organizing the Surveys

The surveys are coordinated by an executive committee, with six elected members:

• Ronald Inglehart, USA
• Juan Diez-Nìcolas, Spain
• Bi Puranen, Sweden
• Yilmaz Esmer, Turkey
• Thorleif Pettersson, Sweden
• Christian Welzel, Germany

The secretariat is based in Stockholm:

• Ronald Inglehart, President
• Bi Puranen, Secretary
• Thorleif Pettersson, Treasury

For more information on the constitution and organisation of the World Values Survey, visit the section on Organisation.

Data from all four waves of the Values Surveys, carried out in 1981, 1990-91, 1995-1996 and 1999-2001 can be obtained from the ICPSR survey data archive at the University of Michigan and from other major archives. The usefulness of these surveys has grown as they have come to provide more complete coverage of the world's societies, and as the time series that they cover has grown longer. More than 80 independent countries have been surveyed in at least one wave of this investigation. These countries include almost 85 percent of the world's population. The World Values surveys provide a broader range of variation than has ever before been available for analyzing the impact of the values and beliefs of mass publics on political and social life. This unique data base makes it possible to examine cross-level linkages, such as that between public values and economic growth; or between environmental pollution and mass attitudes toward environmental protection; or that between political culture and democratic institutions.