Tuesday 14th July      Wednesday 15th July      Thursday 16th July      Friday 17th July     

Wednesday 15th July, 09:00 - 10:30 Room: N-132

European Values Study 1
Convenor	Dr Ruud Luijkx (Tilburg University )

Session Details

The European Values Study (EVS) is a unique research project into Europe’s basic values. First, it spans a period of almost 30 years with surveys in 1981, 1990, 1999, and 2008. Second, EVS has an extensive geographical coverage. In Europe, the survey has gradually been expanded from mostly Western European countries in 1981 to the whole of Europe in 2008. Third, even though several items have been changed in the consecutive waves, EVS still includes an impressive number of unchanged questions. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the questionnaires pertain to a very broad spectrum of life domains: family and marriage, economics, work, leisure, politics, religion, morality. This allows to introduce domain-specific and overarching concepts and to examine the relationships between basic values and attitudes in different fields. Such a rich data source also offers a unique chance for substantive and methodological investigations. We are particularly interested in papers which make use of the comparative potential of EVS from a methodological and a substantive perspective. To give a few examples: Do the measurement instruments that have been used in EVS guarantee comparability across time and space? How accessible is this huge data base? What are the basic empirical findings on long-term change and what are the main cross national differences? How are the specific domain values related to each other and to the overarching concepts? How does one carry out such analyses? What are the main problems? However, other empirical and methodological topics are possible too. Researchers are invited to submit paper proposals for this session on EVS.

Paper Details

1. European profiles of religious beliefs and practices
Dr Loek Halman (Tilburg University)
Dr John Gelissen (Tilburg University)

In this paper we analyze data from the EVS 2008 with multilevel latent class analysis to map religious beliefs and practices of the European countries and individuals simultaneously. Specifically, we identify relatively homogeneous subgroups at country and individual levels with regard to their religious beliefs and practices. First, we group individuals within each country according to their religious beliefs and practices and, secondly, we cluster countries with a similar structure of individual classes. Finally, we seek to explain the observed differences in individual and national subgrouping pertaining to religious beliefs and practices.

2. Polarization of social attitudes in Europe? Trends in educational cleavages
Dr Inge Sieben (Department of Sociology, Tilburg University)
Professor Paul De Graaf (Department of Sociology, Tilburg University)

Public and scholarly debates express concerns about increasing cultural differences in European (and other) western societies. If true, polarization of social attitudes in society is worrisome as it might lead to political conflict and social volatility, especially when it involves a broad range of attitudes. However, has there really been a polarization of social attitudes between higher and lower educated individuals in Europe, with respect to religion, politics, work, family, and moral issues? And: is this polarization dependent on country's economic development and educational expansion? We use four waves of European Values Study (1981, 1990, 1999, 2008) to explore

3. Religious Culture in Host Country and Immigrants’ Membership in Civic Associations
Dr Malina Voicu (GESIS Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences)
Miss Elena Damian (University of Cologne)

The level of migrants’ membership in civic associations is influenced by a mixture of factors, religion being one of them. The current research focuses on the effect of religious culture in host country on immigrants’ civic mobilization. More specific we investigate the role of dominant religious denominations and of religious diversity in boosting immigrants’ involvement in both religious and non-religious organizations. The results of the multilevel regression models run on European Values Study 2008 data show that the dominant religious denomination plays a significant role only in shaping immigrants’ membership in religious associations.

4. Class voting in Western Europe. Do various class schemas make a difference?
Professor Oddbjørn Knutsen (Department of Political Science, University of Oslo)

The paper will use the European Values Survey from 2008 (EVS 2008) to examine and compare class voting in 18 West European countries based on two class schemas, the Erikson-Goldthorpe class schema and a schema developed by Daniel Oesch. While the first-mentioned class schema tap hierarchical positions in the labour market, the last-mentioned schema also includes “horizontal” divisions based on different “work logics” (technical, organizational, interpersonal and independent). Given that the ISCO codes are available in EVS 2008, the comparison is possible since the operationalisations in previous works are based on ISCO. These operationalisations will be used.