Published in The Manila Times, Wednesday, September 26, 2007, p. 5.
From as far back as students can remember, business schools have advised businessmen to carry out “market surveys” before introducing a product in the market, to determine the size of the market for the product or indeed if there is a market for the product at all. Opinion makers later picked up the practice, asking voters for their preference as among candidates, to have a sense of who among the candidates is likely to win the election. These are perception surveys, respondents answering to questions about which they alone are the authority. Typical questions asked are as follows:
Will a product A with characteristics xx be useful to your household? If yes, will you prefer that it has characteristics yy instead?
Between candidates R and S for the presidency, for whom would you vote?
Guided by the results, businessmen develop products that are responsive to customers expressed preference and political candidates formulate programs of government that can win or keep wider voter support. One can say that everybody benefits from these surveys, producers and customers, candidates and voters.
Questions of fact are never posed in perception surveys. For as every beginning college student knows “questions of fact are not debated; questions of policy are.” Questions of fact require reference to statistical yearbooks, encyclopedias, gazettes, visits to libraries, consultations with authorities, etc. If 12 inches make one foot, there can be no disputing that fact, whatever the perception of people is. Ninety-nine percent of respondents saying the earth is flat would not alter the fact that the earth is round. At the same time, giving wrong answers to factual questions can only mean two things: one, that the respondents are ignorant; and, two, that the surveyor is stupid, asking a question of fact as though it could be resolved through perception.
Sadly, this is the state of affairs in the Philippines today. The Social Weather Stations carries out perception surveys about factual questions day after day and relentlessly bombards the community with the results of these surveys. It does not matter to it that the respondents are innocent of the factual answers to questions and that, in most cases,
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even the National Statistics Office or National Statistical Coordination Board will be hard put to give a credible reply. The SWS reports the results to the public as though these are facts cast in stone. Knowledgeable members of the public understandably dismiss the information as no more than idle gossip, and that is the good thing; the bad thing is that some folks take it as gospel truth. Worse, under a deluge of this kind of information some members of the public become perception-driven, mistaking perception for fact and, worse, losing interest in any effort to verify the factual basis of perceptions.
Consider some of the questions the SWS recently asked of its respondents.
Do you believe that, under President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo’s administration:
The quality of education improved?
The number of families who are hungry decreased in your locality?
The number of those unemployed declined in your locality?
The human rights of Filipinos have become more protected?
The number of crimes decreased in your locality?
The morality of government officials improved?
Corruption decreased?
These questions not only raise factual issues but they require specialists for respondents – educators, nutritionists, labor people, police officers, the ombudsman, auditors, and, above all, statisticians. They also suffer from the problems not just of recall but of double recall.
Yet, what does SWS do? SWS asks the questions as if the answers are arrived at through perception. So what if the majority of respondents “believe” that the quality of education has deteriorated, that hunger has intensified, that the rate of unemployment has soared, or that corruption has reached every nook and cranny of government since 2001 when Mrs Arroyo assumed office, when in fact these tendencies have since then moved in the opposite direction? Moreover, can ordinary citizens really recall much less compare aspects of the socio-economic situation “in their locality” before and after 2001?
If respondents express “beliefs” that are contrary to fact, what does that make of them? If it asks questions of fact as though their answers are arrived at through perception, what does that make of SWS?
SWS admits that its “findings” are not necessarily a fair representation of objective reality and are no more than opinion. If that is the case, persistence in projecting such information to the public suggests that SWS is playing the role of rumor-monger, conditioning the public mind to mistake subjective perception for objective fact, to rely on hearsay, and, in most instances, to form perception judgments that are contrary to fact, in other words, promoting mental recklessness on a large-scale.
Its disclaimer that the questions it asks in commissioned surveys are simply those the commissioners want asked and that it has no say on the matter merely confirms the accusation that it is also functioning as a mercenary.
All this is a pity. But it is not too late to do something about it. Under its high caliber intellectual leadership, SWS has the potential of living up to a higher promise – that of producing and circulating useful information such as obtained in election, market, and related surveys -- where perception really matters -- in order to help accelerate the growth and development of our democratic-free market society.
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From as far back as students can remember, business schools have advised businessmen to carry out “market surveys” before introducing a product in the market, to determine the size of the market for the product or indeed if there is a market for the product at all. Opinion makers later picked up the practice, asking voters for their preference as among candidates, to have a sense of who among the candidates is likely to win the election. These are perception surveys, respondents answering to questions about which they alone are the authority. Typical questions asked are as follows:
Will a product A with characteristics xx be useful to your household? If yes, will you prefer that it has characteristics yy instead?
Between candidates R and S for the presidency, for whom would you vote?
Guided by the results, businessmen develop products that are responsive to customers expressed preference and political candidates formulate programs of government that can win or keep wider voter support. One can say that everybody benefits from these surveys, producers and customers, candidates and voters.
Questions of fact are never posed in perception surveys. For as every beginning college student knows “questions of fact are not debated; questions of policy are.” Questions of fact require reference to statistical yearbooks, encyclopedias, gazettes, visits to libraries, consultations with authorities, etc. If 12 inches make one foot, there can be no disputing that fact, whatever the perception of people is. Ninety-nine percent of respondents saying the earth is flat would not alter the fact that the earth is round. At the same time, giving wrong answers to factual questions can only mean two things: one, that the respondents are ignorant; and, two, that the surveyor is stupid, asking a question of fact as though it could be resolved through perception.
Sadly, this is the state of affairs in the Philippines today. The Social Weather Stations carries out perception surveys about factual questions day after day and relentlessly bombards the community with the results of these surveys. It does not matter to it that the respondents are innocent of the factual answers to questions and that, in most cases,
-----------------------------------------
even the National Statistics Office or National Statistical Coordination Board will be hard put to give a credible reply. The SWS reports the results to the public as though these are facts cast in stone. Knowledgeable members of the public understandably dismiss the information as no more than idle gossip, and that is the good thing; the bad thing is that some folks take it as gospel truth. Worse, under a deluge of this kind of information some members of the public become perception-driven, mistaking perception for fact and, worse, losing interest in any effort to verify the factual basis of perceptions.
Consider some of the questions the SWS recently asked of its respondents.
Do you believe that, under President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo’s administration:
The quality of education improved?
The number of families who are hungry decreased in your locality?
The number of those unemployed declined in your locality?
The human rights of Filipinos have become more protected?
The number of crimes decreased in your locality?
The morality of government officials improved?
Corruption decreased?
These questions not only raise factual issues but they require specialists for respondents – educators, nutritionists, labor people, police officers, the ombudsman, auditors, and, above all, statisticians. They also suffer from the problems not just of recall but of double recall.
Yet, what does SWS do? SWS asks the questions as if the answers are arrived at through perception. So what if the majority of respondents “believe” that the quality of education has deteriorated, that hunger has intensified, that the rate of unemployment has soared, or that corruption has reached every nook and cranny of government since 2001 when Mrs Arroyo assumed office, when in fact these tendencies have since then moved in the opposite direction? Moreover, can ordinary citizens really recall much less compare aspects of the socio-economic situation “in their locality” before and after 2001?
If respondents express “beliefs” that are contrary to fact, what does that make of them? If it asks questions of fact as though their answers are arrived at through perception, what does that make of SWS?
SWS admits that its “findings” are not necessarily a fair representation of objective reality and are no more than opinion. If that is the case, persistence in projecting such information to the public suggests that SWS is playing the role of rumor-monger, conditioning the public mind to mistake subjective perception for objective fact, to rely on hearsay, and, in most instances, to form perception judgments that are contrary to fact, in other words, promoting mental recklessness on a large-scale.
Its disclaimer that the questions it asks in commissioned surveys are simply those the commissioners want asked and that it has no say on the matter merely confirms the accusation that it is also functioning as a mercenary.
All this is a pity. But it is not too late to do something about it. Under its high caliber intellectual leadership, SWS has the potential of living up to a higher promise – that of producing and circulating useful information such as obtained in election, market, and related surveys -- where perception really matters -- in order to help accelerate the growth and development of our democratic-free market society.
Xxxxxxxxx
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