Description of the Data

The data used in the tables in the text are drawn from the European Values Study (EVS) 1999/2000, a third follow-up of earlier waves in 1981 and 1990. The EVS is a well-established network of social and political scientists, investigating basic values, beliefs, attitudes, priorities, and preferences of the Europeans and exploring the similarities, differences, and changes in these orientations. An important goal of this wave was to examine whether the emerging concept of one common European identity has an empirical basis.

The questionnaire for the first wave was produced after a detailed explorative study with experts and a pilot study in 1980. A new questionnaire for the third wave was designed taking into account past experience and the new findings of various research groups. In this wave, representative national samples (of different sizes) were interviewed with uniformly structured questionnaires in 33 European countries: Austria, Belarus, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Great Britain, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Latvia, Malta, Northern Ireland, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Slovakia, Slovenia, Turkey, and the Ukraine. The earlier waves had fewer countries in the sample.

The EVS data files, 33 of them for the individual countries, and one integrated data set, come in SPSS format, in an exploration utility, the ZA Codebook Explorer. They report individual answers for each question by country. The sample sizes for each country's survey are as shown in Table A.9.