How much hunger is there now?

The straightforward way to answer this important question is to do a scientific survey on it. Unfortunately, such research is severely hampered by the Enhanced Community Quarantine (ECQ) lockdown.The urgent scientific search for effective actions to combat the COVID-19 pandemic entails massive generation of high-quality data about the people’s well-being, which of course has their actual security from hunger as top priority.

Private survey research institutions, whether non-profit or commercial, have the capacity to help in generating the needed data, as a public service, in the same way that private hospitals and health personnel help government hospitals and health personnel in providing the medical services needed by COVID-19 patients.

The gold-standard mode of gathering social survey data is by face-to-face interviews, on a statistically representative sample of people. Such a sample can readily be drawn for any geographical area, whether national or local. The sampling is generally done by random selection of dwellings, and then a respondent within the dwelling, to be interviewed at home. A face-to-face (F2F) interview easily goes for an hour, and thus gathers more comprehensive data than a telephone interview, which rarely goes beyond 20 minutes before the respondent gets tired and terminates it. It is also more difficult to achieve representative sampling by telephone, because landlines are not widely dispersed, and mobile numbers are not geographically clustered.

The critical constraint on F2F surveying is the government-imposed ECQ lockdown, which hampered government and private research alike, until the Inter-Agency Task Force (IATF) issued a directive last April 17 on Authorized Persons Outside Residences (APOR) that now includes “Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) employees conducting data gathering and survey activities related to COVID-19…” This implies that field staff of private institutes, like Social Weather Stations, should also be exempted from the lockdown, to enable them to help the data gathering.

When cleared for F2F work, SWS intends to use the “Field Protocol in the Period of Health Crisis,” developed by the Marketing and

Opinion Research Society of the Philippines (MORES). This is a new protocol (3/13/20) with safety features for protecting both interviewers and respondents against infection. It includes practices for recruitment of staff, conduct of fieldwork, research on immuno-compromised segments, and research on health care professionals in hospitals and health centers, among other topics. The PSA likewise needs a field protocol for its surveys; or else it could adopt the protocol of MORES.

Many types of data are needed to get a full picture of the COVID-19 situation, including household-level hunger, poverty, food-poverty, realistic poverty lines, the types and sources of assistance received by the poor, the people’s knowledge, attitudes, and practices relevant to the pandemic, and of course the people’s sentiments about the government’s anti-COVID-19 program. These are the sorts of data gathered by the quarterly SWS surveys, which have not been conducted in 2020 as yet. Unfortunately, the ECQ lockdown forced the cancellation of the First Quarter Social Weather Survey, which had been scheduled for the last week of March. Inclusion in the APOR list only loosens the first constraint on the survey work of government and private researchers alike. Another important constraint is the availability of COVID-19-safe public transportation to enable interviewers to reach survey respondents all over the country. Here is yet another challenge that survey researchers face at present, and will do for some time to come.

Contact mahar.mangahas@sws.org.ph