VIENNA—The International Social Survey Program (ISSP), the source of nine out of 10 comparisons I make between Filipinos and other nationalities, most recently on moral attitudes of Filipino Catholics compared to Catholics in Western countries, celebrated its silver anniversary at its annual meeting here this week.
From a three-way collaboration between Germany, Great Britain and the United States in 1984, the ISSP added, chronologically: Australia, Austria, Ireland, Hungary, the Netherlands, Italy, Israel, Norway, the Philippines (represented by Social Weather Stations since 1990), New Zealand, Russia, Japan, Bulgaria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Poland, Sweden, Spain, Cyprus, France, Portugal, Slovakia, Latvia, Chile, Denmark, Brazil, South Africa, Switzerland, Venezuela, Belgium, Finland, Mexico, Taiwan, South Korea, Uruguay, Croatia, the Dominican Republic, Turkey and China.
The first order of business, when the meeting opened last Monday, was to welcome Argentina, Estonia and the Ukraine as new members, bringing the ISSP total to 46. But there are still no other Asean country-members in ISSP besides the Philippines, unfortunately; this delays testing my guess that we Filipinos have greater social similarities to our Asean neighbors than to nationalities farther away.
In ISSP the collaboration between organizations is not special or intermittent, but routine and continual. SWS has done all the ISSP surveys from 1991 to 2008, and will field the 2009 module on social inequality later this year. We do the annual ISSP module, consisting of 60 question items, in conjunction with one of the quarterly Social Weather Surveys.
Since the ISSP is a voluntary network, without central funding, and every member-institute is responsible for paying its own survey bill, for a national sample of at least 1,000 adults, it is quite a feat for ISSP to have grown so large in so short a time. A very important reason for this is ISSP’s pervasive democratic system—one country, one vote—to choose survey topics, to select members to serve on questionnaire drafting groups, to approve each and every proposed survey question, and of course to organize its secretariat and technical committees.
The ISSP combines cross-time and cross-national perspectives into a powerful research design to study societal processes. Its survey topics have been Role of Government in 1985, 1990, 1996 and 2006; Social Networks in 1986 and 2001; Social Inequality in 1987, 1992 and 1999; Family and Changing Gender Roles in 1988, 1994 and 2002; Work Orientations in 1989, 1997 and 2005; Religion in 1991, 1998 and 2008; Environment in 1993 and 2000; National Identity in 1995 and 2003; Citizenship in 2004; and Leisure and Sports in 2007. The data I have cited on Catholics, non-Catholic Christians, and Muslims in the Philippines are from the Religion modules.
The data from the ISSP modules are free for the scientific community around the world; for information on accessing the data archives, see www.issp.org. It takes about two years for the global dataset to be completed, based on submissions from the members. The data for the Philippines in particular are available from SWS within two quarters after the survey is completed.
Reviewing the past quarter-century, some ISSP old-timers (calling themselves “collectibles” rather than “antiques”) said that the greatest value of the global data comes in understanding one’s own country more, seeing it against a cross-country background. I wholeheartedly agree.
Religion is a strong topic in the ISSP, which finds that religious beliefs and practices vary widely across countries, yet they do not change much across time; modernization and secularization aren’t as closely connected as some say they are. Religiosity is clearly greater among senior citizens than among the youth, but this does not mean that it will decline over time, since age cohorts (e.g. “baby boomers,” born in the 1950s) might eventually become as religious as their parents. This will be tracked in future ISSP Religion surveys.
The ISSP surveys are an excellent global data source for examining national pride—which is strong everywhere. For Filipinos in particular, the top sources of national pride are our history, achievements in culture, and achievements in sports. A chapter of the silver anniversary book “The International Social Survey Program 1984-2009: Charting the Globe,” ranks the Philippines ninth among 33 countries on general and on domain-specific national pride—although the ISSP surveys are not contests. SWS’ chapter is “Where’s a great place to work: a global analysis from the perspective of a labor exporting country,” by Linda Luz B. Guerrero, Iremae Labucay, Gerardo A. Sandoval, and me.
ISSP allows tourism too, since the annual venue rotates across members. On Monday, the Austrian Academy of Sciences hosted an organ concert, with pieces by Johann Sebastian Bach, Charles-Marie Widor, and Olivier Messiaen, at the 17th century Church of the Jesuits (a.k.a Old University Church of Vienna), one of Vienna’s most ornate churches. On Tuesday, the Slovak Academy of Sciences hosted an excursion to nearby Bratislava, Slovakia, a charming old city by the Danube.
On Wednesday, the delegates approved the 2010 questionnaire on the Environment, gave guidelines for drafters of the 2011 questionnaire on Health, and chose Family and Gender as survey topic in 2012 (when a topic is replicated, 40 “old” questions are maintained and 20 new ones are designed). They assigned management of the secretariat, ably done by Norway since 2004, to Israel for the next three years. Auf wiedersehen. Next year, Lisbon!
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Contact SWS: www.sws.org.ph or mahar.mangahas@sws.org.ph.
