What the World Thinks About Work

There have also been notable shifts in attitudes by generation, with Millennials becoming much more likely to say they’d welcome a decline in the importance of work, and much less likely to say work should always come first. The study also looks at perceptions of people who don’t work. It finds only Sweden is less likely than the UK to say those who don’t work turn lazy, while the UK also ranks relatively low for the belief that hard work brings a better life. The analysis was carried out as part of the World Values Survey (WVS), one of the largest and most widely used academic social surveys in the world, in operation since 1981. The latest UK data was collected in 2022, with data for other nations collected at various points throughout the latest wave of the WVS, which spanned 2017 to 2022. The World Values Survey (WVS) is an international research programme devoted to the study of people’s social, political, economic, religious and cultural values around the world. Running since 1981, the WVS is the world’s largest and most widely used social survey, with over 800,000 data downloads per year. The WVS covers 120 countries represented across seven waves of data, with the most recent wave – 7 – the largest wave yet.