No poll on the Senate yet
The pundits are having a heyday about the current goings-on in the Senate. But the people’s opinions about it—or about anything else in government, for that matter—are usually last to be published.
This is because Philippine media are not active in opinion polling. They don’t operate polls themselves, and rarely commission them from the research companies. Of course, they are pleased to be informed of polls done by others, and to pass them on in print or broadcast.
In the West, on the other hand, the major media companies have direct polling tie-ups. For instance, there are polls by Reuters/Ipsos, New York Times/Siena College, and Washington Post/University of Maryland. I like Associated Press/National Opinion Research Center in particular, since NORC, which is part of the University of Chicago, is comember with Social Weather Stations (SWS) in the International Social Survey Program. I’ve visited the on-site phone interview labs of ABC, CBS, and the Los Angeles Times.
My point is that those media companies can control the timing and the subject matter of their reports on public opinion. They use their advertising revenue to finance their polls. Here, however, such tie-ups usually happen only during election campaign season, when the media feel they need data very often, like monthly.
An omnibus survey is useful for advocates in public affairs. An omnibus survey is so-named because it carries a fairly large number of “passengers,” along the same “route,” at the same time. The passengers are the questionnaire items that encompass the topics of the survey. The route is the common coverage of the survey, as described by a representative sample of respondents, to be approached by field interviewers during a common time period, and requested to answer the full battery of questionnaire items. The cost of the passage depends on the number of “riders,” or questions to be asked.
For instance, a market research company might offer an omnibus survey on consumer items, with sections on soaps, shampoos, and toiletries, grooming in parlors, clothing, take-out food, etc. This survey can have any number of clients, from various manufacturers and service providers, billed in accordance with the specific questionnaire items for which they are provided exclusive data.
An omnibus client could thus obtain customized data about its own brands, and also about competing brands (confidentially, of course), at a cost much less than that of sponsoring an exclusive market survey. The only real restriction is that of following the same fieldwork schedule as other clients. (Compare taking a scheduled flight to hiring a private plane.) When done periodically, the omnibus allows regular clients to acquire data on a time-series basis and thus understand the effects of their business decisions.
An omnibus survey may span not only business matters but also political and social matters. If it’s private and confidential, then that’s it.
SWS operates a limited omnibus. Four times a year, SWS conducts a national survey of adults to gather data primarily for its Social Weather Report (SWR) on the states of human well-being and governance, using SWS-designed questionnaire items. The questionnaire preparation is done in the first two months of a quarter, and the fieldwork or reference period is typically during the last two weeks. Then follows data processing and analysis, aiming for public release of the corresponding SWR reports in the next quarter and thereafter.
Although an SWR agenda is fairly comprehensive, there is still space in the questionnaire for some externally sponsored items, if consistent with SWS principles of nonpartisanship and permanent data ownership. A good example is the periodic inclusion of survey questions on matters related to the West Philippine Sea, which have been sponsored by the Stratbase ADR Institute for Strategic and International Studies (adrinstitute.org). The findings from these particular questions are for the sponsor’s exclusive use, including public release at a time of the sponsor’s choosing. The underlying survey data go permanently into the SWS archive, and may not be used without the sponsor’s permission until three years afterwards.
SWS will probably be able to report public opinion about current affairs in the Senate, in due time. The questionnaire for the second quarter SWR is currently being finalized; fieldwork is set for later in June; and public reporting can proceed starting in July. If the questionnaire includes probes about events in the Senate, whether conceived by SWS itself or sponsored by others for public use, the survey will expose the views of the Filipino people accordingly.
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