April 2026 · Data Notes
Satisfied, Free, and Raising Children to Obey?
These are personal reflections, not institutional statements. The views here are mine alone and do not represent any organization I am affiliated with.
Three questions in the World Values Survey get closer to daily life than most economic numbers I usually work with. How satisfied are you with your life? How much freedom and control do you feel you have over how your life turns out? And when you think about raising children, is obedience one of the qualities you want to encourage in them? Looked at together, for Turkey and three of its neighbors, they offer a small window into something economic statistics usually miss.
Feeling freer, feeling about as satisfied
In Turkey, looking at every survey wave from 1999 to 2022, the average score people give when asked how much freedom and control they feel over their own life, on a scale from 1 to 10, has climbed steadily: 5.47 in 1999 to 2004, 6.07 in 2005 to 2009, 6.36 in 2010 to 2014, and 6.54 in the latest wave, 2017 to 2022. Life satisfaction, on the same scale, has not moved in anything like a clean line: 5.36, then 5.74, then a sharp dip to 4.85, then back up to 5.87.
One caution about the 2010 to 2014 figure for life satisfaction. The same wave also shows 44 percent of people saying they were not at all happy, compared with 2 percent or less in the waves right before and after it. A jump that size, in just one wave and nowhere else, looks more like something about that particular survey round, maybe a different sample or a different time of year, than a real four year collapse in how Turks felt about their lives. I am including the number because it is what the file shows, but I would not build an argument on top of it.
A separate, larger sample for Turkey, 2,415 people rather than the 1,200 above, put the average life satisfaction score at 6.52 out of 10, higher than the 5.87 from the smaller sample in the same years. The exact number shifts depending on which survey and which sample is used, worth keeping in mind before treating any single figure here as exact rather than a reasonable estimate.
Raising children to obey, or not
The third question is different. Instead of asking people to rate their own life, it asks what qualities they think children should learn at home, and obedience is one option on the list. Christian Welzel and other researchers treat the share of people who do not pick obedience as a sign of what they call autonomy values, the idea that people increasingly want children to think for themselves rather than just follow instructions.
In the most recent wave, 2017 to 2022, the share of respondents who did not select obedience as an important quality for children was 43 percent in Iraq, 44 percent in Egypt, 53 percent in Jordan, and 62 percent in Turkey.
Turkey’s own number has moved around quite a bit over the decades the survey covers: 69 percent in 1989 to 1993, dropping to 54 percent by 2005 to 2009, then climbing back to 62 percent in the latest wave. Egypt went from 47 percent in 1999 to 2004, down to 32 percent in 2005 to 2009, up to 58 percent in 2010 to 2014, and back down to 44 percent most recently. Neither country is on a steady path toward valuing autonomy over obedience. Both bounce around a fair amount from one wave to the next, which should make anyone, me included, careful about reading a single wave as the final word.
What stays with me is how these three numbers sit together. Turkey reports the highest sense of freedom and control of any wave in its own series, a middle of the road life satisfaction score once the odd 2010 to 2014 reading is set aside, and, of these four countries, the strongest preference for raising children who can think for themselves rather than simply obey. Whether valuing a child’s independence today leads to a population that feels freer twenty years from now is a real question, but this data cannot answer it on its own. That would take a very different, longer study. For now, I am noting the pattern, not claiming more than the numbers can support.
Sources: World Values Survey Association and the EVS–WVS research group. Freedom of choice and control and satisfaction with life figures from the EVS–WVS Integrated Time Series 1981–2022, Turkey, variables A173 and A170. Supplementary wave 7 life satisfaction distribution from the World Values Survey Wave 7 (2017–2022) Turkey file, N equals 2,415. Obedience as a child quality figures from the EVS–WVS Integrated Time Series, variable Y021C (the NONOBED component of Christian Welzel’s autonomy index), Iraq, Jordan, Turkey, and Egypt. Figures are the weighted percentages reported in the WVS/EVS online data analysis tool.