The World Values Survey in Great Britain: Examining Values Polarisation in Britain and the World

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Values are the basic principles that inform the judgements we make about what is important in life. They are reflected in our attitudes, judgements, standards of behaviour and determine what we care about. Since 1981, the World Values Survey (WVS) has tracked the evolution of values, attitudes, beliefs and behaviour on topics that range from cultural identity, migration, interpersonal trust, empathy and human tolerance to media usage, political interest and views on science, technology and environmental protection. Today, WVS is one of the largest and most used social surveys in the world. Its global coverage, capturing the views of almost 400,000 people in over 110 countries, has enabled the study of interactions between different values across diverse national circumstances and to monitor how values are changing.WVS fieldwork is conducted in waves every five years. Great Britain has participated in two waves, conducting interviews in 1998 and 2005. Since then, the nation has experienced profound change, from the effects of the financial crisis through to the political volatility following the vote to leave the EU. Understanding whether underlying values within Britain, and between Britain and other nations, have grown apart or come together matters. We are told that the population is split along a variety of fault lines, be it by how we voted in the EU referendum, where we live, our age or our level of education. Whether these differences are real or imagined, fixed or shifting, is of immense consequence. Participating in Wave 7 of WVS offers a timely opportunity to explore where coherent or fractured identities have formed, how deeply and whether these trends are distinctive to other countries.Conducting fieldwork in May 2020, this grant will not only generate a high-quality data resource at a decisive point in the nation's history, soon after the UK intends to leave the EU; the project will conduct new analyses that test whether values, attitudes and beliefs in Britain and elsewhere are polarising, to help shape policy decisions and nuance public discussion about division in Britain against a global context.The project's objectives have four core applications and benefits:1. Thousands of researchers use WVS data as a basis for their work, along with governments, journalists, international agencies and others. Our primary objective is to ensure that fieldwork for Great Britain is conducted in 2020 to generate a high-quality data resource that can be accessed and reused, without restriction, by users around the world.2. Research into division in Britain's values, attitudes and beliefs has largely been issue specific or focused on identities formed around Brexit. The broad subject and country coverage of WVS presents the opportunity to apply a cross-disciplinary, globally-comparative lens to the topic of polarisation, furthering understanding of how individually divisive issues intersect, inform identity and become mutually reinforcing.3. Grouping populations by their values or morals can reveal a fuller spectrum between the attention-grabbing extremities of political identity. We will explore a range of segmentations that provide alternative models for groupings in the British population based on morals or values, moving beyond divisive models such as Leave/Remain, Somewhere/Anywhere, Open/Closed. To support this aim, we will add a set of questions on Moral Foundations Theory.4. There is clear concern within UK government about growing division in society; yet understanding of where the most urgent issues lie is poorly evidenced and rarely considered against the global context. Our fourth objective, to build consensus around where diverging values have implications for UK policy, will deliver a clear benefit to policymakers. Drawing on input from subject and policy experts, we will collaboratively develop recommendations to help improve outcomes around the most divisive or unifying policy areas.