World Values Survey - Wave 7, 2020

The World Values Survey (WVS) is an international research program devoted to the scientific and academic study of social, political, economic, religious and cultural values of people in the world. The project’s goal is to assess which impact values stability or change over time has on the social, political and economic development of countries and societies. The project grew out of the European Values Study and was started in 1981 by its Founder and first President (1981-2013) Professor Ronald Inglehart from the University of Michigan (USA) and his team, and since then has been operating in more than 120 world societies. The main research instrument of the project is a representative comparative social survey which is conducted globally every 5 years. Extensive geographical and thematic scope, free availability of survey data and project findings for broad public turned the WVS into one of the most authoritative and widely-used cross-national surveys in the social sciences. At the moment, WVS is the largest non-commercial cross-national empirical time-series investigation of human beliefs and values ever executed.

The project’s overall aim is to analyze people’s values, beliefs and norms in a comparative cross-national and over-time perspective. To reach this aim, project covers a broad scope of topics from the field of Sociology, Political Science, International Relations, Economics, Public Health, Demography, Anthropology, Social Psychology and etc. In addition, WVS is the only academic study which covers the whole scope of global variations, from very poor to very rich societies in all world’s main cultural zones.

The WVS combines two institutional components. From one side, WVS is a scientific program and social research infrastructure that explores people’s values and beliefs. At the same time, WVS comprises an international network of social scientists and researchers from 120 world countries and societies. All national teams and individual researchers involved into the implementation of the WVS constitute the community of Principal Investigators (PIs). All PIs are members of the WVS.

The WVS seeks to help scientists and policy makers understand changes in the beliefs, values and motivations of people throughout the world. Thousands of political scientists, sociologists, social psychologists, anthropologists and economists have used these data to analyze such topics as economic development, democratization, religion, gender equality, social capital, and subjective well-being. The WVS findings have proved to be valuable for policy makers seeking to build civil society and stable political institutions in developing countries. The WVS data is also frequently used by governments around the world, scholars, students, journalists and international organizations such as the World Bank, World Health Organization (WHO), United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and the United Nations Headquarters in New York (USA). The WVS data has been used in thousands of scholarly publications and the findings have been reported in leading media such as Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, The Economist, the World Development Report, the World Happiness Report and the UN Human Development Report.

The World Values Survey Association is governed by the Executive Committee, the Scientific Advisory Committee, and the General Assembly, under the terms of the Constitution.

Strategic goals for the 7th wave included:

Expansion of territorial coverage from 60 countries in WVS-6 to 80 in WVS-7;
Deepening collaboration within the international development community;
Deepening collaboration within NGOs, academic institutions and research foundations;
Updating the WVS-7 questionnaire with new topics & items covering new social phenomena and emerging processes of value change;
Expanding the 7th wave WVS with data useful for monitoring the SDGs;
Expanding capacity and resources for survey fieldwork in developing countries.
The 7th wave continued monitoring cultural values, attitudes and beliefs towards gender, family, and religion; attitudes and experience of poverty; education, health, and security; social tolerance and trust; attitudes towards multilateral institutions; cultural differences and similarities between regions and societies. In addition, the WVS-7 questionnaire has been elaborated with the inclusion of such new topics as the issues of justice, moral principles, corruption, accountability and risk, migration, national security and global governance.

For more information on the history of the WVSA, visit https://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/WVSContents.jsp ›Who we are › History of the WVSA.