Overview of the datasets

During recent decades, Europe was exposed to remarkable dynamics of simultaneously growing together and falling apart: the traffic of goods, services, and labor between states and regions, within and outside Europe, increased. The European Union was enlarged as a geographical, political, and social unit, and cultural barriers seem to be declining. At the same time, European societies have been challenged by consequential crises: the banking and financial crisis, the economic crisis, and the recession, with the austerity measures imposed, and the refugee crises. How these societal changes are affecting human values?

With the addition of the fifth wave, conducted between 2017 and 2020, the EVS is a unique source of trend data for the last four decades, allowing scholars to investigate the most urgent research questions concerning the values domain of religiosity and morality, politics, family and gender roles, national and European identity, environment, solidarity, and social cohesion.

Many of the questions have been surveyed since earlier waves. This allows the analysis of changes over time in key dimensions of the EVS. Furthermore, a large number of questions are included in the World Values Survey (WVS) surveys from 1981 to 2021, enabling worldwide analyses.

The collaboration with the WVS and the engagement in the SERISS project are crucial aspects of the development of the fifth wave of EVS, together with the strengthening of the methodology standards and practices implemented.

The figure below describes the data products currently available for the EVS as well as the additional datasets resulting from the collaboration with the WVS. For methodological information on each data product, as well as access to the data and documentation, please see the website links on the right site.

The range of possible research questions is very wide and can include any of the topics covered by the EVS. Data users can either use the current EVS 2017 dataset alone or in conjunction with previous EVS waves. They can either look at a specific country alone or in comparison with other European countries (EVS) or even worldwide (WVS).