Religious Beliefs VS. Education
What does people with different levels of education believe in?
World Values Survey is a research program that studies the social, political, economic, religious, and cultural values of people around the globe.
It’s a rich dataset that allows you to explore how people living under various circumstances answer the same 370+ questions.
The 2017-2022 dataset contains approximately 100,000 answers from 66 different countries.
When you use the data to answer your questions, it’s essential to keep track of the number of answers.
100,000 might sound like a lot, but that number dwindles quickly when you start filtering the data.
How does education affect a persons believes?
Religon is one of my favourite topics, but it’s difficult to find accurate data.
The World Values Survey is a good option, but you have to understand that religion and believes can mean different things in different cultures.
Therefore, survey data never perfectly represents the population, but you can often trust that the patterns you detect exist if the methodology is correct.
My first question, and the topic for today, is how education affects people believes.
I wanted to create a colourful and bold chart.
Here’s what I got.
Explanations
I looked at five different questions in the survey.
Q275 - What is the highest educational level that you have attained?
Q165 - Do you believe in God? (Yes/No)
Q166 - Do you believe in Life after death? (Yes/No)
Q167 - Do you believe in Hell? (Yes/No)
Q168 - Do you believe in Heaven? (Yes/No)
The chart show the percentage of people that answer yes, to Q165-168 based on their answer to Q275.
Definitions of education levels varies a bit between countries, so you can’t trust the numbers, but the pattern is very reasonable.
Conclusion
The World Values Survey is a rich dataset where you can explore how people living under various circumstances answer the same set of questions.
It touches on the most essential aspects of our lives and it’s well worth investigating.
Today, we saw that believes in God, Heaven, Life after death, and Hell decrease with higher levels of education.
Request
I will continue exploring the World Values Survey and create additional data visualizations and would love to know if there are questions that you want me to answer with a chart.
You can find all questions here under “Questionnaire”
Let me know what you want to see and what you thought about today’s visualization.
You can write in the comments or message me directly.
Thanks for reading.