Surveys tell ‘little history’

Thirty years ago, in February 1996, I began a column in Evening Paper (EP), which was a new afternoon daily, upon invitation by its editor, my friend Krip Yuson. He wanted a feel-good column, to balance off the typically feel-bad regular news, which he considered tiresome and unattractive to potential readers. Krip knew I was into survey research, of course. I accepted his invitation, and told him to put my column title down as “Little History.” My first two EP columns were “Little history vs big history” (2/27/96) and “Feeling happy?” (2/29/96), with the latter featuring one of the earliest cross-country surveys on happiness.

Among my EP pieces, which ran once or twice a week, were: “Pride in the Philippines” (4/11/96), “Belief in heaven and hell” (4/25/96), “Should we survey about love?” (8/1/86), “A popularity contest for heroes” (1/3/97), “God’s image as mother” (4/1/97), “Pinoy habits of fun travel” (4/8/97), and “Pinoy tolerance for gays” (5/8/97)—which was the final one, before EP unfortunately ran out of funds, and not because my columns were too dull (I hope).

Naturally, many of my EP columns featured the same Social Weather Stations (SWS) stuff that I had been putting into “Social Climate,” which I had done for Amando Doronila in the Manila Chronicle broadsheet, from 1988 until 1993 or so. Anyway, my Chronicle gig lasted up to the point when the Lopezes decided to abandon their print media for broadcast media (i.e. ABS-CBN) instead, in keeping with the media ownership restriction in the 1987 Constitution.

Social Climate was dormant for about three years, until I was invited to write it for the daily Manila Standard (MS) in January 1996; hence I used a different column title for EP. My MS column ran twice weekly until 2001, when I and many others got shed off—when I asked the editor about it, he said that he himself was sacrificed, too. Then, in July 2007, Raul Pangalangan of the Inquirer invited me to be a columnist, and I have felt welcome here for the last 20 years.

Surveys qualify as history. I trust the requisites of my fellow columnist Ambeth Ocampo, the historian: when data are formally recorded, and are archived or made permanently accessible to scholars for study, they are proper material for written history. Scientific social surveys, being statistically representative of some group of people, when repeated periodically, tell the history of those people over time, as perceived by the people’s own eyes and reported to the survey takers.

The doers of surveys-as-history do not have to come from government. There are many scientifically competent survey-doers from the private sector, from both the business and the nonprofit sectors. Thus, nonofficial surveys qualify as history, provided they are open and not secret, just as much as the official ones. Often, such surveys have subject matters that are typically bad news, which the government is loath to bring to light, and is pleased for others to handle. When survey subject matter concerns politicians and other celebrities or big people, then the data become material for both big history and little history.

Survey archiving is essential for history. SWS has been conscious of this from its very beginning in 1985. Our archive contains, as of the end of 2025, a total of 848 datasets, consisting of the recorded answers of 1,267,432 survey respondents to a total of 154,970 questionnaire items. Of the 848 datasets, 368 are national surveys and 480 are subnational ones. The ratio of the number of respondents to the number of datasets, which equals 1,495, is the average sample size of the SWS surveys as cumulated since its start.

Much of the subject matter in the SWS archive is the well-being and quality of life of the Filipino people, since this is SWS’ own main agenda. Much of it is about politics in general and elections in particular, since this is a main interest of many survey sponsors. SWS sponsors are generally entitled, by contract, to an embargo over their commissioned items; but in such cases the embargo expires after three years at most, opening the data for study by SWS and others, under SWS rules. For instance, SWS may charge a fee for data access or copying, as do survey archives abroad; but in no case may SWS data be resold to third parties.

All the national-level surveys in the SWS archive had sample sizes of well over 1,000, which is the golden norm for a national round. The SWS surveys for the annual International Social Survey Program (issp.org), from 1991 to the present, are archived at the Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences (gesis.org), in Mannheim, Germany, along with the survey data of the other ISSP member countries, numbering about 40. SWS’ networks with other surveyors abroad involve other archives. Learning the little history of other countries through their surveys improves our appreciation of our own country’s little history.