How did values and attitudes of people in different countries change during the COVID-19pandemic? Several papers on this question were presented in a session at the 75th Annual Conference of the World Association of Public Opinion Research (WAPOR) in November 2022 in Dubai. A large part of the research results discussed were based on the global Values in Crisis (VIC) study, which emerged from the World Value Survey network on an initiative of value researcher Christian Welzel. In this project, surveys were carried out in 17 countries worldwide. The merging and harmonisation of this extensive data set  took place in Austria: Representatives from the University of Salzburg (Wolfgang Aschauer, Alexander Seymer) and AUSSDA (Otto Bodi-Fernandez, Manfred Herzog) closely collaborated on this activity. This cooperation allowed us to make the international VIC data immediately available in the AUSSDA Dataverse, to value researchers worldwide.

In his presentation at WAPOR, Otto Bodi-Fernandez (AUSSDA Graz) gave an insight into the challenges of data harmonisation, which resulted from different languages and points of data collection as well as from inconsistently collected variables and different scientific cultures.

After more than two years of the pandemic, the conference in Dubai offered researchers from the VIC community the first opportunity to meet in person and exchange ideas about their work.

The Austrian VIC data was collected by a research team from the Social Survey Austria (SSÖ), which consists of a cooperation between the universities of Salzburg, Graz and Linz. The surveys of all three planned waves have now been completed. In addition to the international VIC data of the first wave,  the Austrian data of waves 1 and 2 are available in our Dataverse as well. We are currently preparing the publication of the third wave.