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What you should know about this indicator

  • When available, we consider “Don’t know” and “No answer” to be valid response categories and include them in percentage calculations. “Not applicable”, “Not asked”, and “Missing” responses, however, are excluded from the set of possible answers.
  • The years in the data represent the latest year of each World Values Survey wave, which is not necessarily the year of the survey. For example, the 2022 wave (WVS wave 7) includes surveys conducted between 2017 and 2022. This is done to improve comparability across waves.
Is terrorism justifiable as a political, ideological, or religious mean? 2022
World Values Survey
Average score when asked whether terrorism as a political, ideological or religious means can be justified, on a scale from 1 ("never justifiable") to 10 ("always justifiable").
Source
World Values Survey (2024) – with major processing by Our World in Data
Last updated
June 27, 2025
Next expected update
August 2026
Date range
2022–2022

Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

World Values Survey

The World Values Survey (WVS) is an international research program devoted to the scientific and academic study of social, political, economic, religious and cultural values of people in the world. The project’s goal is to assess which impact values stability or change over time has on the social, political and economic development of countries and societies. The project grew out of the European Values Study and was started in 1981 by its Founder and first President (1981-2013) Professor Ronald Inglehart from the University of Michigan (USA) and his team, and since then has been operating in more than 120 world societies. The main research instrument of the project is a representative comparative social survey which is conducted globally every 5 years. Extensive geographical and thematic scope, free availability of survey data and project findings for broad public turned the WVS into one of the most authoritative and widely-used cross-national surveys in the social sciences. At the moment, WVS is the largest non-commercial cross-national empirical time-series investigation of human beliefs and values ever executed.

Retrieved on
June 30, 2026
Retrieved from
https://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/WVSDocumentationWVL.jsp
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
Inglehart, R., Haerpfer, C., Moreno, A., Welzel, C., Kizilova, K., Diez-Medrano J., M. Lagos, P. Norris, E. Ponarin & B. Puranen (eds.). 2022. World Values Survey: All Rounds – Country-Pooled Datafile Version 5.0. Madrid, Spain & Vienna, Austria: JD Systems Institute & WVSA Secretariat. https://doi.org/10.14281/18241.17

The World Values Survey (WVS) is an international research program devoted to the scientific and academic study of social, political, economic, religious and cultural values of people in the world. The project’s goal is to assess which impact values stability or change over time has on the social, political and economic development of countries and societies. The project grew out of the European Values Study and was started in 1981 by its Founder and first President (1981-2013) Professor Ronald Inglehart from the University of Michigan (USA) and his team, and since then has been operating in more than 120 world societies. The main research instrument of the project is a representative comparative social survey which is conducted globally every 5 years. Extensive geographical and thematic scope, free availability of survey data and project findings for broad public turned the WVS into one of the most authoritative and widely-used cross-national surveys in the social sciences. At the moment, WVS is the largest non-commercial cross-national empirical time-series investigation of human beliefs and values ever executed.

Retrieved on
June 30, 2026
Retrieved from
https://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/WVSDocumentationWVL.jsp
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
Inglehart, R., Haerpfer, C., Moreno, A., Welzel, C., Kizilova, K., Diez-Medrano J., M. Lagos, P. Norris, E. Ponarin & B. Puranen (eds.). 2022. World Values Survey: All Rounds – Country-Pooled Datafile Version 5.0. Madrid, Spain & Vienna, Austria: JD Systems Institute & WVSA Secretariat. https://doi.org/10.14281/18241.17

How we process data at Our World in Data

All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.

At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.

Read about our data pipeline
Notes on our processing step for this indicator

We processed the indicators from the microdata of the World Values Survey Time-Series (1981-2022) using Stata. Weights are applied for each country.

We consider “Don’t know” and “No answer” to be valid response categories and include them in percentage calculations. “Not applicable”, “Not asked”, and “Missing” responses, however, are excluded from the set of possible answers.

We processed the years in the data to represent the latest year of each WVS wave, which is not necessarily the year of the survey. For example, the 2022 wave (WVS wave 7) includes surveys conducted between 2017 and 2022.

Reuse this work

  • All data produced by third-party providers and made available by Our World in Data are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately (see below). This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.
  • All data, visualizations, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.

Citations

How to cite this page

To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:

“Data Page: Is terrorism justifiable as a political, ideological, or religious mean? 2022”, part of the following publication: Bastian Herre, Veronika Samborska, Hannah Ritchie, and Max Roser (2023) - “Terrorism”. Data adapted from World Values Survey. Retrieved from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260701-102549/grapher/perceived-justifiability-of-terrorism-as-a-political-ideological-or-religious-means.html [online resource] (archived on July 1, 2026).

How to cite this data

In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

World Values Survey (2024) – with major processing by Our World in Data

Full citation

World Values Survey (2024) – with major processing by Our World in Data. “Is terrorism justifiable as a political, ideological, or religious mean? 2022 – World Values Survey” [dataset]. World Values Survey, “World Values Survey Version 5.0 (1981-2022)” [original data]. Retrieved July 1, 2026 from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260701-102549/grapher/perceived-justifiability-of-terrorism-as-a-political-ideological-or-religious-means.html (archived on July 1, 2026).

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