World Values ​​Survey

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The World Values Survey (dt. About World Values Survey , short WVS ) is the most comprehensive and weiträumigste survey on human values ever conducted. It is an ongoing academic project by social researchers to determine the status of socio-cultural, moral, religious and political values ​​of different cultures around the world. Most of the results can be found on the project website.

history

The first representative wave of the World Values ​​Survey took place in 1981 in 22 countries. Ronald Inglehart from the University of Michigan in the USA is considered to be the main actor in the global survey of people about their attitudes and values .

The work of the research group around the European Values ​​Study (European Values ​​Study - EVS) was built upon . The EVS examined the value attitudes of people in 8 Western European countries. The scientific patronage was taken over by Jan Kerkhofs and Ruud de Moor, whose university - the University of Tilburg - is the headquarters of the EVS to this day.

The first survey was repeated after about 10 years, which was called "waves" after the second implementation. One of the goals of the project was the longitudinal measurement of the development of values ​​in the respective countries. More waves followed the second at approximately five-year intervals.

Due to the European origin of the project, in the early waves of the WVS, surveys were mainly carried out in western countries and African and Southeast Asian countries were underrepresented. In order for the WVS to be carried out in more countries, a decentralized organizational structure was created. In this way, the WVS grew beyond its Europe-weighted origin to include 42 countries in the second wave, 54 in the third and 62 countries in the fourth wave.

The data of the WVS are freely available on its website and are also available there for a descriptive analysis using an online analysis tool. The WVS secretariat is based in Stockholm, Sweden and the WVS data archive is located in Madrid, Spain.

Methodology and survey

The WVS methodology consists of handling detailed questionnaires in personal interviews. The complete version of the questionnaires for all six waves can be viewed on the WVS website. The 5th wave questionnaires consisted of around 250 questions. Between 1,000 and 3,500 people were interviewed in each country. In the fourth wave z. B. there was an average of 1330 interviews per country, which corresponds to a global total of around 92,000 surveys.

Results

The first Inglehart value card (1999-2004)
The second Inglehart- Welzel value card (2005–2008)

The WVS questionnaire consists of around 250 questions, which amount to 400 to 800 measurable variables. Some examples are as follows:

luck

The WVS examines the individual perception of happiness in different countries. This part of the WVS is also the one most cited by the press. The Nationmaster statistics website z. B. published a simplified version of the World Happiness Measure based on WVS data. However, the WVS website itself allows for a more advanced level of analysis, as well as comparing happiness trends per country over time and between different socio-economic groups. One of the most noticeable shifts in the measurement of happiness was the significant decline in happiness in the Russian population, as well as some other populations in Eastern European countries, during the 1990s.

The culture card

The culture map is another result of the WVS survey. Some variables have been grouped into two dimensions of cultural variation (known as "traditional values ​​vs. secular-rational values" and "survival values ​​vs. self-development values"). On the basis of this two-dimensional spectrum, countries could be divided into certain cultural regions. The WVS claims: These two dimensions explain more than 70% of the cross-national variance in a factor analysis of ten indicators. These results also confirm Max Weber's theses on the sociology of religion , according to which culture is strongly influenced by religion.

Development towards democracy

Inglehart discovered that self-development values ​​lead to a desire for democracy . The survey found that trust and democracy were the values ​​that crossed most cultural boundaries. The survey also showed that gender equality is one of the most significant differences between Western and other cultures.

criticism

Positive feedback

The Dutch intercultural researcher Geert Hofstede takes the WVS results positively. In relation to Inglehart's two-dimensional abbreviation of his results, as shown in the Inglehart map, Hofstede assumes that it supports his own work.

“Inglehart's key cultural dimensions were very much like my dimensions. Well-being versus survival was strongly correlated with individualism and masculinity; Secular-rational versus traditional authority correlated negatively with power distance. "

- Geert Hofstede : Cultures Consequences

Other experts comment critically that Inglehart's two dimensions are not identical to Hofstede's five dimensions. In view of the differences in methodology (Hofstedes was based on interviews with IBM employees), it is not surprising that there are differences between his results and those of the World Values ​​Survey .

Skeptical feedback

  • Some voices see a source of error in the WVS methodology in the bias of the results due to the social desirability of certain answers, which can never be ruled out in standardized surveys. This concept is based on the assumption that the respondents in the concrete interview situation tend to give their information according to the assumed expectation of them.
  • The evaluation of the answer category “Don't Know” was also criticized, which was increasingly given by respondents to the open questioning of the importance of democracy (Global Barometer Project: in East Asian countries 20% to 30%), but also to the specific answer categories for Value of democracy (World Value Survey: up to 40% in India and China) and which would make a meaningful interpretation difficult.
  • Another criticism relates to the theoretical assumptions on which the division into cultural groups is based. Alternatively, representatives of the transcultural theory of democracy suggest distinguishing between countries with and without experience of democracy. The concept of division into cultural groups goes back to Samuel P. Huntington from his work Clash of Cultures (German translation) and is scientifically highly controversial. In the WVS, this classification is used with the argument of comparability, because this is the only way that comparative references to earlier research can be meaningfully drawn.
  • Another objection relates to the assumed universality of the concept of democracy and accuses the conceptualization of the survey of an imperialism of categories as well as a hegemonic relationship between researchers and research objects.

See also

literature

  • Russell J. Dalton / Christian Welzel (Eds.): The Civic Culture Transformed. From Allegiant to Assertive Citizens. Cambridge University Press, New York / Cambridge 2014, ISBN 978-1-107-03926-1 .
  • Ronald Inglehart : Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society. Princeton University Press, Princeton 1990, ISBN 0-691-02296-8 .
  • Ronald Inglehart: Modernization and Postmodernization: Cultural, Economic and Political Change in 43 Societies. Princeton University Press, Princeton 1997, ISBN 0-691-01181-8 .
  • Ronald Inglehart; Pippa Norris: Rising Tide: Gender Equality and Cultural Change Around the World. Cambridge University Press, New York / Cambridge 2003, ISBN 978-0-521-82203-9 .
  • Ronald Inglehart; Christian Welzel: Modernization, Cultural Change and Democracy. Cambridge University Press, New York / Cambridge 2005, ISBN 978-0-521-84695-0 .
  • Pippa Norris; Ronald Inglehart: Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide. Cambridge University Press, New York / Cambridge 2004, ISBN 0-521-83984-X .
  • Pippa Norris; Ronald Inglehart: Cosmopolitan Communications: Cultural Diversity in a Globalized World. Cambridge University Press, New York / Cambridge 2009, ISBN 978-0-521-49368-0 .
  • Christian Welzel: Freedom Rising. Human Empowerment and the Quest for Emancipation ( en ). Cambridge University Press, New York / Cambridge 2013, ISBN 978-1-107-03470-9 .
  • Christian Welzel; Ronald Inglehart: The Role of Ordinary People in Democratization. In: Journal of Democracy. Volume 19, No. 1, 2008, pp. 126-140, doi : 10.1353 / jod.2008.0009
  • De La Rosa, Sybille / Schubert, Sophia / Zapf, Holger (eds.): Transcultural Political Theory. Trans- and intercultural political theory and history of ideas, Wiesbaden: Springer Fachmedien 2016. ISBN 978-3-658-05010-8

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. The interactive database allows about 400 variables (January 2006). However, it is stated that the website has 800 variables available. It is possible that many of these variables were not followed up after the second wave when the number of questions decreased from 379 to 250. For more details, see ( http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/ ).
  2. z. B. "Nigeria tops happiness survey" , BBC News Online, October 2003. Robles, Alan (from New Scientist Report) "Happiness Viewpoint: It Doesn't Make Much, Despite burden like poverty and pollution, Filipinos tend to be happy. Why? ” , Time Asia Magazine, Feb. 20, 2005
  3. http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/wvs/articles/folder_published/article_base_54
  4. ibid.
  5. ^ Sage Publications, 2001, ISBN 0-8039-7323-3 , pp. 33-34.
  6. Schubert, Sophia: To what extent is it universal? On the concept of democracy in comparative research on democracy . In: De La Rosa, Sybille / Schubert, Sophia / Zapf, Holger (eds.): Transcultural political theory . Springer Fachmedien, Wiesbaden 2016, p. 285-303 .
  7. ^ Lu, Jie / Shi, Tianjan: The battle of ideas and discourses before democratic transition: Different democratic conceptions in authoritarian China . In: International Political Science Review . No. 36 . SAGE, 2015, p. 20-41 .
  8. Simone Dietz: Clash of Cultures? About Huntington's thesis. Retrieved January 18, 2017 (German).
  9. Rudolph, Susanne Hoeber: The Imperialism of Categories: Situation Knowledge in a Globalizing World . In: Perspectives on Politics . tape 3 , no. 1 , 2005, p. 5-14 .