The World Values Survey is an academically-driven social survey originally developed to answer the question, "What makes people happy?". It investigates socio-cultural, moral, religious and political values of different cultures around the world and looks for the relationships between people's values and beliefs and their overall levels of well-being.

The World Values Survey consists of nationally representative surveys conducted in almost 100 countries which contain almost 90 percent of the world’s population, using a common questionnaire. The WVS is the largest non-commercial, cross-national, time series investigation of human beliefs and values ever executed, currently including interviews with almost 400,000 respondents. The surveys the full range of global variations, from very poor to very rich countries, in all of the world’s major cultural zones. First run in 1981, the surveys is currently takes place around every 5 years.