World Values Survey
razib | December 6, 2009At my other weblog I looked at some of the data on the international data on religion. There are two positions in regards to religious trends which always crop up.
* That in the medium-to-long term religion, in particular supernatural religion, will disappear.
* That in the short-to-medium term we are in the midst of a "religious revival."
The first position has been held more or less by some intellectuals since the Enlightenment. The second position is something that I'm familiar with contemporaneously. The reality is that the world is not going through a revival in religiosity if by…
razib | October 27, 2009I show that Protestants like Israel; Midwesterners not so much, at Secular Right. Also, many nations are getting more religious, but young people are still less religious, at Gene Expression Classic.
razib | July 9, 2009Tom Rees of Epiphenom has a new paper out, Is Personal Insecurity a Cause of Cross-National Differences in the Intensity of Religious Belief?. The abstract:
Previous research has shown an apparent relationship between "societal health" and religiosity, with nations that exhibit higher mean personal religiosity also tending to provide worse social environments. A possible cause is that exposure to stressful situations (i.e. personal insecurity) increases personal religiosity. To test this hypothesis, income inequality, a widely available proxy for personal insecurity, was compared with other…
razib | May 6, 2009With the whole controversy around Michael Savage being blocked from entering England because of his inflammatory comments I thought I would look at attitudes toward speech. One thing I've noticed is that Americans tend to be less instrumental when it comes to matters of speech; that is, speech is not justified as a means, as opposed to being a basic liberal right. In contrast in most other parts of the world people seem more likely to justify the right to speech as a utility in the service of some other end. This difference results in a variance in the way people approach offensive and…
razib | April 25, 2009One of the major problems in most societies, subject to "great sorts" of various kinds, is the fact that people observe correlations of attitudes & beliefs, and infer from those necessary relations. For example, if one of the first things that someone finds out about me is that I am an atheist, there is a general presupposition that I am a Left-Liberal. It is true that there is a robust relationship between atheism and liberalism in the United States, the problem I have, as an admittedly illiberal atheist, are those who believe that atheism entails liberalism. In a specific instance I…
razib | April 21, 2009The World Values Survey has a question about immigration policy with four options:
- Let anyone come
- As long as jobs available
- Strict limits
- Prohibit people from coming
I used WVS 2005-2008 from 57 countries first. Then I filled out the countries with the
Four-wave Aggregate of the Values Studies, the combined file of the four waves carried out by both the EVS and WVS. I bring this up because there are discrepancies between the two where there are duplications.
Again Vietnam is at the top of the list. Perhaps Will Wilkson should have picked another country to trade in his American…
razib | April 20, 2009There is a question on the World Values Survey which allows people to give a number corresponding to their position on a spectrum where 0 = "Ethnic diversity erodes a country´s unity" and 10 = "Ethnic diversity enriches my life." Below the fold I've placed the countries where this was asked as well as the mean values. In other words, the proportions in each class were used as weights. The results frankly surprised me. Below is an ordered list:
Ethnic Diversity Enriches
Jordan
2.9
Ghana
4.8
Egypt
5
Thailand
5.3
Georgia
5.4
Bulgaria
5.5
Moldova
5.7
Cyprus
5.7…
razib | April 19, 2009The blog of the Buddhist magazine Tricycle has responded to my post that Buddhists generally believe in God. Some of the comments also brought up some semantic issues which are real in how Buddhists view God, and how it might be distinguished from more personalized conceptions of the divine being, especially in the Abrahamic religions. The short of it is that many Buddhists will accede that gods may exist, but that their role in the religion is relatively marginal. Additionally, Buddhists reject the Creator God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, which is an important distinction.
First, though the…
razib | April 16, 2009There are some really weird comments about Albania below. Part of these confusions have to do with ambiguities as to the religious identity of Albania, traditionally majority Muslim, but after decades of Communism very secular. What exactly are the religious breakdowns? How religious are Albanians? Additionally some of the same questions are thrown toward the Bosnian Muslims. Are Balkan Muslims true religious moderates, or, are they simply secular Europeans whose ancestors practiced the Muslim religion?
The World Values Survey can help answer these questions, or least put some numbers on…