The data are part of a larger survey conducted in 1999 in 32 countries in
Europe (see https://europeanvaluesstudy.eu/). Vermunt (2003)
obtained a sample from 10 percent of the available cases per country,
yielding 3584 valid cases.
The item in the 1999 European Values Study questionnaire aiming at recording
materialism/postmaterialism reads as follows:
There is a lot of talk these days about what the aims of this country
should be for the next ten years. On this card are listed some of the goals
which different people would give top priority. If you had to choose, which
of the things on this card would you say is most important? And which would
be the next most important?
A Maintaining order in the nation
B Giving people more say in important government decisions
C Fighting rising prices
D Protecting freedom of speech
The double-choice task implies a partial ranking of the alternatives and
(assuming transitivity) an incomplete set of paired comparisons for each
respondent.
The country group according to postmaterialism was derived by Vermunt (2003)
using a latent class model, and applied by Lee and Lee (2010) in a tree
model.