SIXTH WAVE OF THE WORLD VALUES SURVEY. IN PREPARATION. Ever since Christian Welzel joined the CSD as a Pro- fessor for P
New Research Project (funded by the German Research Foundation)
SIXTH WAVE OF THE WORLD VALUES SURVEY IN PREPARATION Ever since Christian Welzel joined the CSD as a Professor for Political Culture Research in 2010, work on the global survey project “World Values Survey” (WVS) has been an important part of the Center’s research activities. Now, Prof. Welzel is preparing the sixth wave of the WVS in Germany – a major project funded by the German Research Foundation, involving the conduct of 2000 face-to-face interviews. Can most people be trusted? How important is work in your life? Is marriage an outdated institution? In 1981, a group of researchers under the leadership of Jan Kerkhofs and Ruud de Moor conducted a survey in 10 West European countries, investigating into people’s beliefs and values in areas such as family, work, politics, and religion. In the following years, the survey that was originally confined to Europe gradually included more and more countries, becoming a global project: the World Values Survey. In addition to the geographical expansion, the survey was repeated frequently over the following years, four times since 1981. The most recent fifth wave was carried out between 2005 and 2008, covering 56 countries all over the world. Today, the WVS is the most widely cited project among cross-national surveys. Monitoring the development of a large set of values and beliefs over the past 30 years, the WVS makes it possible not only to compare people’s attitudes towards different subjects between countries, but also to trace changes of attitudes over time. It thus presents an opportunity to investigate a broad set of questions of interest to political science research. One of the people having shaped the development of the World Values Survey is CSD’s Professor Christian Welzel, Vice-President of the World Values Survey Association. In his research, Prof. Welzel has been exploiting the enormous opportunities opened up by the WVS data for many years. Recently, for example, he has conducted research on the effect that eman-
In the past, WVS data has, for example, been used to map the development of values in different world regions. This figure shows how emancipative and secular values have changed between 1995 and 2005.
cipative values have on the emergence and stability of democratic regimes. Together with Amy Alexander, a former post-doctoral fellow at the CSD and now Maria Goeppert Professor at the University of Goettingen, he has analyzed the role of emancipative values in the empowerment of women. In 2010, researchers all over the world started to carry out the sixth wave of the WVS. In Germany, this project takes place under Prof. Welzel’s leadership. The German part of the survey will involve the conduct of 2000 faceto-face interviews, 1000 in East, and 1000 in West Germany. A special innovation is the combination of the survey in Germany with an online experiment: After the completion of the interview, the respondents are asked to participate in an online game simulating situations in which they have to cooperate with other individuals. With this experiment, Professor Welzel and his project partner,
Prof. Christian Thöni (University of Lausanne), hope to be able to establish a connection between a person’s values and her willingness to cooperate with others – a link that is largely unexplored to date.
Funding Project: Value Orientations and Cooper- German Research Foundation ation: Exploring the ValueBehavior Link Duration: 11/2012-10/2015
Contact: Prof. Christian Welzel Fon: +49.4131.677-2453
[email protected] 