Staying on mission

The start of the year is when Social Weather Stations pauses to plan about how best to stay on its mission of doing scientific social surveys that help to improve the wellbeing of the Filipino people.

Human wellbeing is a broad concept, for which SWS regularly generates scientific survey indicators of many dimensions of the quality of life (QOL), for the use of all. Survey data about QOL serve to educate about social conditions, provide alerts to social problems, and promote conscientization, analysis, and appropriate action on the said problems.

SWS has become a center for alternative statistics, by focusing on subject matter that are socially, rather than privately, meaningful. It admires, and has benefited from, the practical survey techniques originally developed by Filipino market researchers, but does almost no market-oriented research for business clients. It then archives its survey materials for future public research.

National development becomes evident when scientific data show improvement compared to the past, rather than compared to other countries. Thus, SWS emphasizes the generation of data regularly across time—quarterly whenever possible—rather than across space. Timeliness is more critical than geographical detail. So as to be timely, SWS surveys are rapid and frequent. The high frequency is affordable by using small, efficient, sample sizes, and by accepting bottom-up, self-reported, indicators as equally valid to top-down, money-based indicators.

SWS is not mindlessly neutral on all issues. It is openly prodemocracy, because of the human rights and freedoms that democracy guarantees, particularly the freedoms of speech and expression, which are fundamental to the very existence of opinion polling.

SWS is a nonstock, nonprofit research institute, beholden to no one, supporting itself from contracts, while devoting half of its survey items for pro bono work. It has to be as businesslike as any nonprofit hospital or university, for the sake of financial self-sufficiency. It plows back operational surpluses to upgrade its physical and human research capacity.

The SWS surveys are not done for the sake of publicity. They are shared both through the mass media and many other channels. SWS appreciates the media’s dissemination of the surveys, for the empowerment of all.

Though the SWS work program for the new year is not yet collectively decided, my personal, and tentative, ideas are:

1. Continue to provide guidance to all stakeholders about the quality of governance. Credit should be given where it is due, and withheld otherwise. In a recent SWS report card for performance of the national administration, the best subject was of assisting disaster victims, and the worst was that of resolving the Maguindanao massacre case.

2. Intensify statistical advocacy for fighting poverty. Econometric research is consistently showing that poverty is more surely alleviated by the reduction of inflation than by general economic growth. Aside from the self-rated thresholds for poverty in general, and for food-poverty in particular, there is a need for regular tracking of the costs of other basic needs such as housing, clothing, transportation, and communication.

Survey research can also assist other antipoverty directions like the reduction of underemployment and the protection of the real value of wages of government workers and private-sector workers.

(SWS has been participating, survey-wise, in early impact-evaluation of the conditional cash transfer program. The findings are very encouraging so far; by design, the full impact will occur when the beneficiary children finish high school.)

3. Gear up for the seasonal challenge of predicting election results. The worldwide litmus test for survey quality, and thus reliability, is the ability to predict election results. SWS periodically takes up the challenge of engaging in election surveys, to validate the quality of its work. It is politically nonpartisan, but accepts the role of partisanship in a democratic setting, and recognizes the value of surveys for all sides.

4. Help to achieve peace in Mindanao. Aside from assessing public opinion on the peace process, surveys can measure the states of personal safety and security and the extents of trust among various cultural groups.

5. Clarify public opinion on issues of foreign policy and national security. The Chinese threat to the West Philippine Sea and the relations with the United States on security matters are topics that should be followed.

6. Study public opinion on matters connected to religious affiliation. After the legislation on reproductive health, for which surveys were quite pertinent, the next topics for study would be proposals for legalization of divorce and the formulation of LGBT rights.

7. Study public readiness for actions to cope with climate change.

Obviously, statistics are not food for the hungry, or weapons for warding off invaders. What they do is provide a stream of both immediate and potential knowledge about the status (the “balance sheet”) and progress (the “profit-and-loss statement”) of society. This knowledge is for the use of present and future people in government, business, academia and other entities, individually or collectively, who have the mission and capacity to directly improve the wellbeing of the country.

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Contact mahar.mangahas@sws.org.ph