World Value Survey data

The World Values Survey is a world-wide consortium of investigators focused on understanding socio-cultural and political change.  See http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/.  Under the leadership of Ronald Inglehart at the University of Michigan, the project has undertaken five waves of surveys, the first in 1981 and the most recent in 2005-2007.  Surveys have now covered 66 countries (in one or more waves), representing more than 80 percent of the world’s population.

Extensive sets of questions have characterized each wave.  Analysis has, however, identified two orthogonal dimensions of values that persist across waves and that together organize responses to many of the socio-cultural questions.  The project has labeled these traditional/secular-rational and survival/self-expression.  In addition, a pattern of movement from moderns to post-modernist orientations has been discovered that characterizes societies.  Ronald Inglehart has been kind enough to provide data on each of these three dimensions across all five waves.  In addition, he has provided data on responses to a substantial number of individual questions from the first three waves.  The IFs project has worked with Inglehart in structuring the first efforts to forecast value change on the two primary underlying dimensions.

Notes

There is one series from the WVS that is used in the preprocessor: SeriesCulExComDum - there is no information on when this was last updated.