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NEW OPINION PORT LIFETYLE ENTERTAINMENT BUINE TECHNOLOGY GLOBAL NATION

COLUMNIT

OCIAL CLIMATE

urve data are permanent

By: Mahar Mangahas - @inquirerdotnet Philippine Dail Inquirer / 05�02 AM Jul 09, 2022

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 The surveys of Social Weather Stations (SWS) have always been intended as

EDITOR' PICK MOT READ
SECTIONS Saturday, July 9, 2022  TODAY'S PAPER 
contributions toward the writing of serious history, rather than as source NEWINFO
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material for mass media reporting. Data from scientific social surveys are chair Arroyo bats for
permanent records that cannot be denied. cheap electricity

BUINE
For instance, my Inquirer pieces, “History by the numbers,” “No ‘golden TMC Iloilo achieves two
lifesaving milestones in
age’ under Marcos,” “The ‘social weather’ during martial law,” and one day
“Ferdinand Marcos ran away,” of last Jan. 8, and Feb. 5, 12, and 19
NEWINFO
respectively, are backed up by the SWS archives, which are open to any ‘Sooner than later’: DOF
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These surveys of Filipino sentiments felt three decades ago are literally Fearless views on the news
priceless: If ever the original data get lost, there is no way to reproduce
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them again, for any amount of money. The best way for present historians
By providing an email address. I agree to the Terms of Use and
to recall the past, if they did not personally live through it then, is to rely on acknowledge that I have read the Privacy Policy.

the records that were made right at those times. “Old” surveys don’t lose the
meaning by already having been released to the media long ago. Present
memories and impressions of the past could also be surveyed now; but they
are memories and impressions nonetheless.

It has been SWS’ consistent policy, since 1985, to archive all its original
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survey data. Every answer of every respondent, to every question asked in Wh women �nd older men o attractive

an SWS survey, is digitally recorded and permanently filed; this is a “bit” of

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data. It’s not the individual bits that matter, so much as the whole of them urprie ou

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Every SWS survey is statistically representative of the population that it is
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designed to cover. The way to question a survey is to present alternative Well eing review

surveys; the truth of a situation will derive from the competition of the by Taboola

observations.

SWS follows the best practices of global survey archives; some of its surveys
are also stored in those archives and thus easily available to non-Filipinos.
Data obtained from first-class procedures deserve to be stored for use and
reuse, over and over. Any field responses tainted by dishonesty or
malpractice are garbage.

The answers of all respondents in a survey, filed together, make up a

dataset. The dataset of a standard survey that addresses 250 questions to
1,200 respondents is a matrix, or table, of 250 columns (one per question)
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and 1,200 rows (one per respondent), containing 250 x 1,200 = 300,000 cells
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of data bits. As of March 31, 2022, SWS had archived 331 national datasets
 and 380 subnational datasets, that recorded the answers of 1,084,623
 SECTIONS Saturday, July 9, 2022
respondents to 128,896 survey questions. (Backup copies of datasets are  TODAY'S PAPER 
stored in two separate locations as insurance against disasters, natural or
man-made.)

In line with its advocacy for research on human well-being, SWS repeats
certain crucial topics quarterly—see “192 poverty surveys in 40 years”
(3/26/2022) and “95 hunger surveys since 1998” (4/2/2022)—with question-
wordings carefully maintained, in survey after survey, so as not to influence
the trend over time. (But respondents are not repeated; there is fresh
random sampling every time.)

These SWS time-series constitute the world’s fastest survey-monitoring of

poverty and hunger. They deliberately compete for public attention with
the government’s quarterly reporting of gross domestic product, which
business-people, particularly those in finance, typically use to rate
“economic performance” even though GDP is barely correlated with the
people’s economic well-being (see “Watch poverty, not economic growth,”
5/21/2022). The statistics that business people look for tends to be only
whatever affects their own businesses.

Other important items that SWS constantly monitors are the people’s recall
of what happened to their personal Quality of Life in the past 12 months—
got better, got worse, or stayed the same?—and what they expect will
happen to it in the next 12 months—get better, get worse, or stay the same?
In 2022Q1 there were still fewer Gainers than Losers, but as usual more
Optimists than Pessimists.

Why should so much of written history be about political personalities and

the competitions among the powerful, rather than about grassroots living
conditions and the struggles of the deprived? Source materials for writing
the big history include contemporary journalism. The data for writing the
little history should include the permanent archives of scientific surveys.

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——————

Contact: mahar.mangahas@sws.org.ph

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