The World Values Survey (WVS) polls people from over a hundred countries on cultural values questions scored on two axes: secular vs traditional, and survival vs self-expression. The data is used to create the Inglehart-Welzel Cultural Map:

The 7th wave of polling began in 2017, concluded in 2022, and was published in 2023.

The WVS will conduct Wave 8 surveys in the mid-2020s (currently planned 2023-2026). When the results are published, will they show that, the average of all countries surveyed will score higher on self-expression (individualism) in Wave 8 compared to Wave 7?

"all countries" means all countries that are include in both Wave 7 (2017-2022) and Wave 8. If a country is excluded in Wave 8 that was surveyed in Wave 7, or a country was included in Wave 8 that was excluded in Wave 7, the country will not be used when averaging "all countries." Note that WVS includes sub-regions, such as Macau, Hong Kong, and Northern Ireland, so these will also count.

"individualistic" refers to the Wave 8 data corresponding to the survival vs self-expression axis. In Wave 8's data, this is labelled as "SurvSAgg." If there are multiple years of data in the Wave 8 period, I will use the most recent one.

"average" means I will take the most recent scores in Wave 8's data for each of these countries and take an average in excel. I will also do this for the most recent data for Wave 7's data, and if Wave 8's average is higher than Wave 7's, this question resolves YES.

The Wave 7 data that makes up the Cultural Map is available here. I have taken the data and averaged the self-expression values for all countries, which gave me a result of 0.209.

More questions about the next World Values Survey: