Letter from Puerto Vallarta
SUN-DRENCHED Puerto Vallarta is a booming resort town on the Pacific coast of the Mexican state of Jalisco, home of mariachi and Tequila—which is a “controlled appellation” like wine in France.
I knew nothing about Puerto Vallarta until told by friends that it was a stop of the cruise ship Loveboat, from the television series. Now I know that it was a secluded beach that got famous as the site of John Huston’s “The Night of the Iguana” with Ava Gardner, Deborah Kerr, and Richard Burton (who brought Elizabeth Taylor along just for company). Its population grew from a few hundred then, in 1962, to a few hundred thousand now. The iguana is a local icon.
But I have no swimsuit, and am here for the annual meeting of the 47-country International Social Survey Program (www.issp.org). Of course, it’s also a very enjoyable visit. Our hosts, the Guadalajara-based Instituto de Mercadotecnia y Opinion (www.imocorp.com.mx), under Cesar Augusto Morones Servin, gave us not only mucho Tequila but also a full-dress mariachi concert, and acquaintance with the great film stars Jorge Negrete and Pedro Infante. Ay Jalisco, Jalisco!
Back to work. SWS, an ISSP member since 1990, has done all its surveys since 1991. ISSP is by far the most important source of original survey data for comparing Filipinos with other nationalities.
The topics of the ISSP surveys have been Role of Government (1985, 1990, 1996, 2006), Social Networks (1986, 2001), Social Inequality (1987, 1992, 1999, 2009), Family and Changing Gender Roles (1988, 1994, 2002), Work Orientations (1989, 1997, 2005), Religion (1991, 1998, 2008), Environment (1993, 2000, 2010), National Identity (1995, 2003), Citizenship (2004), Leisure and Sports (2007), and Health (2011).
In Sunday’s research session, Tom Smith from the University of Chicago spoke on “Cross-national differences in attitudes towards homosexuality,” based on responses to the ISSP survey question in four rounds over 1991-2008: “And what about sexual relations between two adults of the same sex, is it always wrong, almost always wrong, wrong only sometimes, or not wrong at all?” His general finding is that countries have overwhelmingly become more accepting of homosexual behavior.
Among 24 countries surveyed in 1998 and 2008, the Philippines was at the bottom (4.4 percent in 2008), in calling homosexual behavior “not wrong at all.” (The Netherlands was on top, with 69.6 percent in 2008.) Though very small, Filipino acceptance is, like other countries, on the way up, having been only 2.5 percent in 1998. Filipinos calling this behavior always wrong dropped from 83.5 percent in 1998 to 78.7 percent in 2008. These figures are verifiable by anyone, since the ISSP global dataset is in the public domain.
On Monday, ISSP secretary-general Noah Lewin-Epstein, of Tel Aviv University, announced the acceptance of the Jerusalem Media and Communication Centre (JMCC) as a new member, as a special, one-time exception to the rule that members should represent nation-states. The JMCC is a Palestinian polling institute that covers both the West Bank and Gaza.
The Methodology Committee reported that it had considered the general criticism of agree/disagree (A/D) survey items as affirmation-biased, and had concluded that it had been based on poorly-worded or highly-loaded examples from non-ISSP surveys. ISSP will continue to use A/D items, taking proper care to phrase them fairly.
The main work of an annual meeting is to discuss and approve the draft questionnaire for the next year. In the 2012 topic, Family and Gender Roles, one item (previously used in 2002) will be the A/D: “Divorce is usually the best solution when a couple can’t seem to work out their marriage problems.” A new item will be: “A same sex female couple can bring up a child as well as a male-female couple.” A similar one will replace “female” by “male.”
On the last day, the assembly voted for another Citizenship module in 2014. Redoing a module implies repeating 40 old items for the sake of time series analysis, and designing 20 new ones. Elected to the questionnaire drafting group were Belgium, Canada, Chile, Denmark, and Taiwan. They are tasked to submit a first draft next year, and a final draft for item-by-item approval in 2013. (Earlier, the Philippines had served in the drafting groups on Religion, National Identity, Environment, Citizenship, and Sports.)
The Philippines was elected to the ISSP Standing Committee, filling the vacancy left by expiration of the term of Spain. This committee assists the secretariat in key matters of governance, such as the acceptance of an applicant. Its other members are Israel, Norway, Sweden and the United States.
The election to fill two vacancies in the ISSP Methodology Committee was won by the United States (re-elected) and Portugal.
The sites of future ISSP meetings will be Dubrovnik, Croatia in 2012, Santiago, Chile in 2013, and somewhere in Finland in 2014. If one can legitimately combine tourism with work, why not?
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When assessing the government performance ratings released by SWS this week, one should not only compare the last two quarters, but take the entire data series, starting from the Cory Aquino administration, in perspective. The SWS reports provide time-charts for this purpose.
Writing a + sign before net satisfaction ratings that happen to be positive is not optional, unlike in algebra. It is an important reminder that the number that follows describes a net and not a gross level of satisfaction.
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Contact SWS: www.sws.org.ph or [email protected].
