EVS

Infrastructure and User Services

The European Values Study (EVS) is a major international research infrastructure dedicated to the collection, archiving, and dissemination of high-quality, comparative data on human values across Europe. Its core asset is a harmonized, longitudinal survey dataset collected in over 45 countries since 1981, covering themes such as religion, politics, work, family, and social trust. The infrastructure includes standardized questionnaires, rigorous sampling procedures, and quality control protocols, ensuring comparability across time and space.

The EVS data are curated and made openly accessible through trusted data archive, including GESIS. It also collaborates with the World Values Survey (WVS) to provide integrated global datasets, enabling both European and global comparative research.

In terms of services, the EVS supports users through comprehensive documentation, metadata, and online tools for data exploration and analysis. It offers guidance on data usage, workshops, and methodological resources for both novice and advanced users. Scholars, educators, and policymakers benefit from user-friendly access to datasets and visualizations, while the infrastructure supports open science by encouraging replication and secondary analysis.

The EVS is also actively involved in capacity building and international cooperation, fostering a vibrant research community. It thus functions not only as a data provider but as a platform for knowledge exchange, comparative research, and methodological innovation in the study of human values.

Examples/description of the type of research

The European Values Study (EVS) facilitates comparative, interdisciplinary research on cultural, moral, and social values across Europe. As a large-scale, cross-national longitudinal survey, it provides rich data on how Europeans think about key aspects of life—such as religion, family, work, politics, and social trust—over time and across countries. The EVS enables researchers to study value change and continuity within and between societies, offering insights into the dynamics of modernization, secularization, democratization, and individualization.

Because it includes repeated waves of data collection (since 1981), the EVS is particularly well-suited for longitudinal analysis of social change, allowing scholars to identify trends and turning points in public opinion and cultural norms. The harmonized methodology and wide geographical scope make it ideal for cross-national comparisons, supporting analyses of how contextual factors—such as welfare regimes, historical legacies, or levels of economic development—shape individual values.

The EVS supports a wide range of disciplines, including sociology, political science, religious studies, economics, and psychology, and is commonly used in both quantitative and mixed-methods research designs. It is also a key resource in policy-relevant research, informing debates on European identity, social cohesion, populism, and democratic legitimacy. In sum, the EVS is a foundational infrastructure for scholars interested in understanding the cultural underpinnings of European societies and how these evolve in response to social, economic, and political transformations.

How to access the infrastructure?

Users can consult the European Values Study (EVS) through several open-access platforms and services designed to support both basic and advanced data use, most prominently via the GESIS Data Archive for the Social Sciences.