The aim and development of the infrastructure

This infrastructure program is the Swedish part of the European Values Study (EVS). The EVS is an international research infrastructure aiming at measuring human values from a broad perspective in Europe. Sweden has been part of the EVS since the start in the early 1980s. The study has been carried out approximately every ninth year and Sweden has taken part in each of the fifth waves.
EVS has an explicit focus on human values. The survey covers broad topics within the social sciences such as e.g.; religion and religiosity, working life and spare time, gender issues, political participation and political attitudes. The long time span of the EVS program makes it possible to map gradual processes of value change, such as the level of secularization, within and across European countries.

The EVS-data is used by researchers, students and other societal actors around the world. Through collaboration with World Values Survey (WVS) it is possible to compare European values with values in other countries or regions around the world.

EVS has a central European organization consisting of different organs, among others a joint assembly with representatives of all countries, a methods group and theory group with responsibility to develop the joint questionnaire.

The implementation of the survey in Sweden

EVS Sweden is a cross-sectional survey based on a random selection of Swedish residents of and above 18 years of age. The total number of interviews carried out in the 2017/18 survey was approximately 1200.

All EVS-studies uses a common questionnaire, translated into the language(s) of all participating countries. Proceeding the fieldwork, EVS Sweden was evaluated and approved by the regional ethical board in Umeå. The firm responsible for the fieldwork was decided based on a procurement process, which was won by IPSOS. The fieldwork consisted of interviews of about 60 minutes based on the standardized EVS questionnaire, and were carried out in the autumn 2017 and spring 2018. The responsible researchers continuously monitored the data collection.

In addition to the standardized survey, the respondents were offered the opportunity to respond to additional questions after the main interview. These questions were part of a number of survey experiments, selected by a panel of scientific experts after an open call for proposals.

After the fieldwork was completed, the data was quality checked by researchers and a research assistant at Mid Sweden University, in line with the standardized protocols developed by the EVS methods group. In addition to the data, an extensive documentation on the survey and its implementation was fact checked and deposited at EVS central register. Following the first delivery of data and documentation, the data went through a quality control at EVS centrally, was returned to Mid Sweden University for another round of processing, and was finally checked by EVS centrally before made publicly available.

Unexpected technical and methodological problems

The fieldwork started the autumn 2017, a few months later than originally planned due to a delay in the planning process of the questionnaire at the central European level. Further, due to unforeseen problems with recruiting a sufficient number of respondents, the data collection period was extended. As a result, the data collection was not completed by January 2018 as originally planned, but rather in late spring 2018. As a consequence of these delays, the Swedish data was not included in the first release of the joint EVS-data set, but rather in the second, and expanded data set, published in July 2019.

The joint data set is made available through GESIS data archive in Cologne. GESIS has however experienced some problems with the website which has caused some problems for externa users to download the full dataset. Data is currently made available here: https://www.gesis.org/en/services/data-analysis/international-survey-programs/european-values-study/

Since each country that participates in the EVS study is responsible for securing their own funding, data collection is carried out at different points of time in different countries. This prolongs the creation of the joint cross-national data file, as well as the linking to the data in the World Values Survey (WVS). According to the original plan, the longitudinal data set with all survey waves and all participating countries was planned to be released at the conference of the International Political Science Association, in Madrid in July 2020. Some countries in Central and Eastern Europe who secured funding at a late stage were however forced to interrupt the data collection due to the Covid-19 pandemic and the restriction that followed, which has delayed the release of the longitudinal data set.

EVS in the future

Together with other major Swedish partners in international survey programs in the social sciences, EVS Sweden has entered a new consortium, with the joint aim of securing future Swedish participation in these types of data collection efforts. The consortium – CORS – is a consortium with three partners: Gothenburg University, Mid Sweden University and Umeå University. CORS coordinates and provides survey based research infrastructure for social science research. Both national infrastructures and nodes for Swedish participation in international infrastructures are represented in CORS, which gathers some of the largest and most well-known survey based research programs in Sweden: European Social Survey (ESS), European Values Study (EVS), International Social Survey Programme (ISSP), The Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) and the Swedish National Election Study (SNES). CORS also includes the Laboratory of Opinion Research (LORE), which carries out data collections online and focuses on panel and experimental studies.

From the perspective of EVS, the main goal of CORS is to secure funding for the sixth wave of data collection in 2026. In addition, CORS is likely to enhance knowledge exchange regarding issues such as of research ethics, and to increased national visibility for the EVS data. More information on EVS in CORS can be found here: https://cors.se/evs/

At the European level, a corresponding collaborative effort between infrastructure projects (SERISS) has received funding the European Research Council. This effort has for examples lead to increased synchronization across surveys concerning common background variables such as income and education.

The process of planning the next wave of EVS has already started at the central European level. Sweden is represented in the central team that will design the following survey. This work comprises of both theoretical work related to the points of departure for the study, and the choice of method for data collection.

Publications

There are several ongoing projects with cross-country comparative efforts based on the EVS data. The Swedish team takes part in one book project about value polarization with scheduled publication in 2021. There is also an ongoing collaboration within the Nordic region, with plans for a joint publication. A joint Nordic workshop scheduled to take place in Copenhagen in 2020 has been delayed due to the corona pandemic.