[Blog Project Assignment 1] my analysis of WVS

 

This is a statistics about whether each nation's people can accept sex before marriage. I tried to select as diverse countries as possible on Inglehart-Welzel cultural map to see the perception that depends on the characteristics of the countries. So I chose Jordan with survival and traditional values, the United States with self-expression and traditional values, Germany with secular-rational and self-expression values, Japan with secular-rational values, also middle values between survival values and self-expression values. And finally South Korea. 

To briefly explain these values, traditional values emphasize religiosity and nation pride. So they are relatively conservative. The secular-rational values, as opposed to the earlier, is open to various issue. The survival values have low levels of tolerance because they prioritize safety and survival than other values. Finally the self-expression values pursue higher dimension like living well and self-expression desire than one-dimensional desire for survival from war or poverty. They tend to respect various values and issue. 

Now let's look at the upper table based on this information. Sex is an extremely personal matter but is also taboo in some places. In particular, doing sex before marriage can be unacceptable problem for people who have conservative aspect. 

Looking at Jordan, less than 1% think it is justifiable, while nearly 90% think it can never be justified. It may be because they value on religious. Country that are closer to self-expression values have a higher percentage of people who think this issue is justified. Now what should we are noted here is that U.S, which has the self-expression values than Germany, has a smaller percentage of agreement. In my opinion, premarital sex seems to be taken for granted more in Germany. because U.S has a high value for self-expression but also has traditional values at the same time. while Germany has a lower values for self-expression than U.S but has secular-rational values. And predictably, South Korea has more negative opinions.

Here's another good example to prove this. Zimbabwe is a country of similar value to Jordan above example. The rest of the countries are the same. 

On this topic, casual sex, all countries had more negative position overall than positive ones.

But instead of understanding that all countries have conservative and negative opinions, let's focus on how few negative position and how the proportion of positive position has increased. About casual sex, nearly 80% of Zimbabwe said that they couldn't justify. Because they also follow traditional values and have defensive attitude. South Korea also had an overwhelming majority of negative opinions because we values survival. On the other hand, Germany and the U.S are showing similar statistics unlike earlier example. Although Japan pursue secular-rational values, but also both survival and self-expression values so Japan seems to prevail negative opinions. 

Casual sex is a sexual relationship that is formed to get pleasure with mutual consent even there's no love. and this is an unacceptable value for sensitive and conservative people. Thus, there were many negative opinions overall countries. However, if analyzed this issue by age group, the younger generation who support freedom and emphasis privacy, relatively agree more with casual sex. 

Let's look at Germany and U.S which have self-expression values. This table shows the percentage of agreement rate about having casual sex by age. As you can see, in both countries the younger generation has a high rate of agreement for casual sex, while group 50 and more generation gave a distinct decline in agreement. Therefore, it can be seen that the age group, as well as the country values, has a lot  influence on statistics. 

I was able to know that there are many factors affect on statistics and also I could understand the two dimension(four values aspect) deeply through this analysis project.