Recent research argues skills are the key to socio-economic success for individuals and societies, ranging from labor market outcomes to non-economic well-being. Drawing on these arguments, this ...study re-examines the linkage between the skills level of societies and people’s life satisfaction (LS), using the joint European Values Study–World Values Survey data for 48,930 individuals in 32 countries. Multilevel regressions confirm the positive association between these two variables, as suggested by the literature. However, there exists one outlier where the average LS score is markedly low despite its high skills level: Japan. Examining the mechanism behind this overall cross-national trend and Japan’s peculiar position—Japan Paradox—is a promising agenda for future multidisciplinary research, as it may reflect not only the favorable link between skills and LS but the hidden socio-economic structure—Skills Trap—that prevents highly skilled people from enjoying better well-being even under seemingly well-developed social conditions.
This article focuses on the health perceptions of people across social strata and nations using the combined dataset of the World Values Survey and the European Values Study (EVS/WVS). An ...intercategorical intersectional analysis model was developed to examine the social determinants underlying differences in health perceptions. Using logistic regression of the interactions between sex, age, level of educational attainment and income, we calculated the impact of these variables (main effects) and their interactions within the intersecting categories on health perceptions. The group with the best perception of their health includes men aged 16–49, with a high income and an upper-middle level of education. Comparative analysis has been carried out to identify differences in the influence of intersectional categories across countries. Of particular relevance is the number of Eastern European countries where the perception of people aged 50 and over with low income is very poor.
The Schwarz or Bayesian information criterion (BIC) is one of the most widely used tools for model comparison in social science research. The BIC, however, is not suitable for evaluating models with ...order constraints on the parameters of interest. This article explores two extensions of the BIC for evaluating order-constrained models, one where a truncated unit information prior is used under the order-constrained model and the other where a truncated local unit information prior is used. The first prior is centered on the maximum likelihood estimate, and the latter prior is centered on a null value. Several analyses show that the order-constrained BIC based on the local unit information prior works better as an Occam’s razor for evaluating order-constrained models and results in lower error probabilities. The methodology based on the local unit information prior is implemented in the R package “BICpack” which allows researchers to easily apply the method for order-constrained model selection. The usefulness of the methodology is illustrated using data from the European Values Study.
Since there has been a considerable increase in studies on attitudes toward immigrants in recent years, particular attention must be devoted to the survey instruments used to measure them. Since they ...first appeared, both the European Values Study and the World Values Study have included a battery of questions to measure social distance, asking which social groups respondents would not be willing to have as neighbors. One of these social groups is ‘immigrants/foreign workers.’ The wording of this item contains a certain degree of ambiguity, as the terms ‘immigrants’ and ‘foreign workers’ refer to two different social groups. Foreign workers are in fact a subcategory of immigrants. Our contribution sets out to assess the working of the item, using a survey experiment randomly assigning respondents three different formulations (‘immigrants/foreign workers’, ‘immigrants,’ and ‘foreign workers’). The data come from the Italian joint edition of the European Values Study-World Values Survey 2017. The results show that Italians perceive a much larger distance toward immigrants than toward foreign workers, which is nevertheless similar to the distance perceived toward ‘immigrants/foreign workers.’ Overall, the empirical evidence suggests the semantic prevalence of the item ‘immigrants’ over ‘foreign workers’ in respondents’ answers. In light of the results, we will discuss their implications for both data users and future values surveys.
Do Europeans really feel European? Do they trust each other and are they solidary? What do they think of immigration and refugee influx? Do they want a greener and more sustainable Europe, and at ...what cost? Are democracy and human rights ingrained in Europe or are they under pressure? A new edition (2022) of the ‘Atlas of European Values’ answers these and other questions related to pressing topics such as migration, democracy, sustainability, welfare, identity, and solidarity in an attractive, visual way. In the Atlas, the reader will find maps, charts and graphs based on high-quality data of the long-term comparative survey research project, the European Values Study.
This study analyses in detail the dynamics of the development of different types of worldviews (religious and particularly non-religious) in Slovakia. It is based on the results of four censuses ...along with the European Values Study (EVS) conducted in Slovakia in 1991, 1999, 2008, and 2017. The basic analytical tool is the typological method based on data from the EVS. The results show that in Slovakia, among the large number of possible theoretical types of worldviews, only five are empirically present in an analysable quantity, two of which concern people without religious affiliation. The results show that in this latter group, which has remained around 25% over the long term in Slovakia, the majority are rather indifferent to religion and only about one-fifth of them (4.5% of the total population in 2017) are people who can be considered atheists.
This article examines the links between education, democratic values, and political trust. Research on education systems as carriers of modern orientations and democratic values worldwide predicts ...that educated individuals will exhibit more democratic values than less educated ones, regardless of the country’s level of democracy. In the political culture approach, political trust can be understood as a reflection of the congruence or incongruence between individual democratic values and the level of democracy of the political system, which emphasizes trust’s relational character. Integrating these strands of literature, I formulate hypotheses about the mediating effect of democratic values between education and political trust. To test these hypotheses, I employ multilevel models of data from the World Values Survey and the European Values Study covering 73 countries. The results show that democratic values partially mediate the effect of education on political trust, but the magnitude of this effect depends on the level of democracy. Analyses also show that, while education is positively associated with democratic values regardless of the country’s level of democracy, this association is much stronger in democratic countries than in non-democratic ones.
Background
The thesis of religious decline, central to secularization theory, has become massively contested among social-scientific students of religion. Its critics observe not so much decline, but ...rather change in the religious landscape of Western Europe, in effect pointing out that the decline of Christianity's traditional institutional, doctrinal and ritual dimensions should not be mistaken for a decline of religion tout court.
Purpose
In this research note, we address this ongoing debate among sociologists of religion by studying whether traditional Christian religiosity has declined in Western Europe over the past four decades, and whether the same applies to religiosity more broadly conceived.
Methods
To examine these trends over time, we analyze data from the European Values Study (1981–2017) for nineteen Western-European countries. More specifically, we carry out multi-level linear- and multi-level logistic regression analyses.
Results
We demonstrate that both traditional Christian religiosity and religiosity more broadly conceived have declined, with the former declining at a much higher pace than the latter. We also find that those who continue to be religious and/or spiritual deviate increasingly from the traditional Christian model. Thus, when one does encounter religiosity, it is much more likely to be non-traditional religiosity than was true in the past.
Conclusions and Implications
We conclude that religion has declined, whether one understands it narrowly as traditional Christian religiosity, or more broadly. Even though new forms of religiosity and spirituality cannot compensate for the loss in traditional Christian religiosity, they do make up an increasing portion of the overall declining religious pie. Finally, we reflect on the limitations of the data from the European Values Study (1981–2017) and make an urgent call for better survey data, especially by including more suitable questions with which to measure types of religiosity and/or spirituality that deviate from the traditional Christian model.
National parochialism has attracted academic attention as its negative consequences have become increasingly apparent in the globalizing world. To empirically approach this issue, previous studies ...measured national parochialism employing experimental methods. The present study introduces a new approach using self-reported survey data. The advantages of using self-reported survey data lie in the access to a greater number of observations in a wider variety of countries with rich socioeconomic and demographic background information. Specifically, we use questions asking the respondents about the closeness to one’s country and the closeness to the world in the World Values Survey and European Values Survey and define their difference as national parochialism. Using this measure, we assess its validity and investigate the sources of the individual variations. Our main results and contributions are as follows. First, our measure of national parochialism is compatible with the ones in experimental studies. Second, we confirm the findings in the previous studies that national parochialism correlates with sex, educational level, and political ideology, with some cross-country variations. Third, we add new findings to the literature that national parochialism correlates with native status, age, marital status, income class, employment status, as well as both mother’s and father’s native statuses and educational levels, with the tendency that people in the socially insecure position are more parochial. We also uncover that the COVID-19 pandemic raised the level of national parochialism. These results point to both the scope and limitation of policy intervention for managing parochialism at the population level.
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