Methodology and Data
摘要
In this chapter, we discuss the methodology and the data for our analysis of the global willingness to adhere to the Ten Commandments. Our research is based on a multivariate analysis of data from the World Values Survey, the freely available “global barometer” of opinion, launched in 1981, and containing a series of nationally representative surveys conducted in nearly 100 countries, covering almost 90 per cent of the world’s population, using a common questionnaire on the attitudes of the world’s population towards religion, politics, economics, society, education, prejudice, gender and sexuality, and the family. The WVS is the largest non-commercial, cross-national, time-series survey of human beliefs and values ever conducted, and currently includes interviews with nearly 400,000 respondents. Our sample with complete data covers 4.9 billion people around the world, i.e. some 62.6% of the global population in 2020. Our research attempt is guided by the vast traditions of mathematical-statistical analysis in opinion survey research. We discuss parametric and non-parametric index construction, factor analysis, and levels of significance. In our multivariate analyses of the relationships between global values and global believing, and national aggregate data, due emphasis was also given to dependency and world system approaches to development, which received a large-scale empirical confirmation in earlier studies. We refer to important datasets, which guided our ideas of cross-national analysis, and give an insight on which variables our indicators of religious morality are constructed. We also debate error margins of smaller samples, needed to assess the opinions of political party supporters around the globe.