Who likes everything?

The initial media release (10/8/17) from the Third Quarter Social Weather Survey, fielded on Sept. 23-27, shows President Duterte with a grade of Good in public satisfaction, and Very Good in public trust. These compare with Very Good satisfaction and Excellent trust in the second quarter.

For me, Excellent, Very Good, and Good are like gold, silver, and bronze medals in academics or athletics. I think getting a medal in public satisfaction, even a bronze one, means that the honeymoon is not over (“Observing public satisfaction,” Opinion, 10/14/17).

A medal for general performance, however, doesn’t mean medals for every particular. In September, the administration got simply passing grades for fighting hunger, recovering Marcos wealth, dealing with traffic, solving extrajudicial killings (EJKs), and fighting inflation (“We don’t exaggerate,” 10/21/17).

The passing grade on the EJK issue did not imply that people accept the claim that the victims fought the police, who only reacted in self-defense (“Belief in the truth of police claims of ‘nanlaban’ continues to decline,” www.sws.org.ph, 10/23/27). Liking someone or something doesn’t mean liking everything connected to it.

Conversely, the people’s doubt about the truthfulness of the police regarding “nanlaban” in particular does not necessarily imply their distrust of the police in general, or, for that matter, their distrust in Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa, the Philippine National Police chief. (SWS will report, in due course, the trust ratings of some officials in the public eye, among them Dela Rosa.) Disliking something doesn’t mean disliking everything or everyone connected to it.

A quarterly SWS survey has many details, and three months or more for reporting them. The March 2017 survey had 155 noncommissioned items, and generated 22 media releases from April 12 to June 30. The June 2017 round, with 145 items, gave rise to 17 releases from July 10 to Oct. 5. The September 2017 round, with 137 items, has produced seven releases so far, and will allow at least 18 more in the next two months.

The reports will include the standard SWS indicators of family wellbeing such as poverty and hunger, trends in personal quality of life from the past and into the future, items of public opinion regarding governance, and items on attitudes on current concerns, for instance, trust in foreign countries, particularly the United States and China.

There is no propaganda or political agenda embedded in the SWS reporting system. Each new release has new content. Significant demographic details, if previously unpublished, constitute new content. The same holds for correlations discovered between questionnaire items, and newly made compilations over time.

We have learned, from experience, that a single combined report of all the contents of a survey is not digestible by the media. A few findings will get sensationalized, and many interesting ones overlooked, to gather dust. Such cherry-picking harms the SWS mission of serving as an instrument of democratic discourse.

Across all the various topics covered in one survey, on one set of respondents, researchers assume that there is consistency, or an inner logic, in the responses. Faith in such logic is what backs the use of science in analyzing the data.

It is not necessary that survey respondents be conscious about consistency in their responses. They do not need to know, and are not asked to explain, how their responses are logically tied together. They only need to respond to the survey questions as honestly as they can.

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