World Value Survey

The World Values Survey project was born with a survey carried out in 1981 from European Values Survey (EVS) coordinated by Jan Kerkhofs and Ruud de Moor, which involved ten countries of West Europe.
The survey was replied in other 14 countries and it developed a new project finalized to monitor the main cultural and social mutations in the world. The second survey was carried out in 1990-91 and it involved more of 165 nations (from five continents); it followed the third survey in 1995-96 while the fourth carried out in 1999-2000. The third has been carried out with the specific aim to extend the data about non-occidental country and to analyse the development of the political culture in lately democratisation countries. In this project the European Values Survey group (EVS) did not participate.

The main themes of World Values Survey are:
- Values (individual and social)
- Meanings imputed to being and future proposals
- Attitudes about religion, morality, politic, sexual freedom, marriage and mono-parent family.
- Attitudes about labour (importance of financial aspect, satisfaction towards own occupation)
- Appraisal about the world economy stability
- Opinions about different forms of political actions, aims of national politic, trust in national political institutions, possible motivations for a war participation
- Political self-placement and participation, participation to groups or associations
- General level of well-being

The World Values Survey project is supported by international network of researchers who independently finance the collection of data in the different belonging countries. They have an immediate access to the data product by other national teams, while the public accessibility is bound by an embargo of 2-3 years.

The coordination and distribution of data are guaranteed by the Institute for Social Research of University of Michigan, under direction of Ronald Inglehart. On the web site http://wvs.isr.umich.edu/index.html are available the texts of questionnaires, some methodological notes, the list of publications carried out on the data and some synthetic notes about principal results of comparisons.
In Italy the data about the World Values Survey can be asked to ADPSS-Sociodata which receives them directly from ICPSR in the University of Michigan.