Abramson Paul R., Inglehart Ronald. Value Change in Global Perspective

Ann Arbor: The University Michigan Press, 1998. — 193 p. — ISBN 0-472-09591-9This book is the product of a long but sporadic collaboration, for the two authors have been working together off and on for over a quarter of a century.
We met at a conference on political socialization in Ann Arbor in the summer of 1967. That meeting led to ajointly authored article, which was published in 1970. In that same year, the first European Community survey measured Materialist/Postmaterialist values in Western Europe.
During the next dozen years both of us worked independently on studies of intergenerational population change. In the spring of 1983 we began to analyze the impact of intergenerational value change in West Germany, Britain, The Netherlands, France, Belgium, and Italy, producing two articles, one examining the impact of replacement on values in these six countries, and one that projected the likely impact of future generational replacement.
By the mid-1980s, when these articles appeared, the semiannual Euro-Barometer surveys, which monitor public opinion in the European Community (now European Union) countries, were an ongoing enterprise. We recognized that the analysis of intergenerational value change was, inherently, something that would require a long-term commitment in order to obtain stronger evidence. Several additional years elapsed, providing a longer time series. We were thus able to add Denmark and Ireland to our study, and to conduct more complex multivariate tests.
It gradually became apparent that a comprehensive analysis would need to go beyond Western Europe. By 1990–91, the forty-nation World Values Survey was well under way, and Inglehart, as the global coordinator of this survey, was able to begin analyzing these data in early 1992.