In praise of survey women
In the Philippines, March is National Women’s Month, hence the timing of the recent Social Weather Stations (SWS) report: “83% of Filipinos say a woman’s role is to look after the home and family; public opinion on the role of women has been conservative for many years,” www.sws.org.ph, 3/4/26.
Actually, the full agree-disagree statement reflected by the title was: “A man’s job is to earn money; a woman’s job is to look after home and family.” Aside from the 83 percent agreement, there was 8 percent disagreement, putting net agreement at +75. Results were similar for men (+77) and women (+73). Those numbers are from 2025, the latest time surveyed by SWS, which also did it in 2021, 2012, 2002, and 1994. In 1994 the net agreement was +71, with men at +73 and women at +68.
The new SWS report covers five other attitudes, within the module, Family and Changing Gender Roles, of the International Social Survey Program (ISSP), which SWS joined in 1990. Gender is but one of 12 modules that ISSP has developed; SWS has implemented all of them, annually in 1991-2025.
Women are tried and true survey soldiers. The main aim here, my first column for March, is to give long overdue credit to women as survey soldiers. Women, rather than men, are the ones who put boots on the ground to personally encounter, face-to-face, a large number of scientifically designated respondents, to whom they are complete strangers, and persuade them to give honest answers to a multitude of questions. Nothing is as fundamental to the quality of the data as the success of their interviews.
Women have a special advantage over men as survey interviewers in that they are nonthreatening to the security of the home, and hence are much more acceptable to respondents. A survey field worker is trained to choose the respondents’ homes, not based on friendliness of appearance, but through a systematic random process. How many families would readily open their door to the knocks of a strange MAN, without a previously arranged appointment?
If the door is opened, then the interviewer has to convince whoever opens it that her mission is worthwhile (henceforth, I’ll use the feminine pronoun for the interviewer). In market research, interviewers often have free samples of consumer goods to sweeten the responses, but a nonprofit like SWS has little to offer of material value. We rely on our reputation, on the civic-mindedness of prospective informants, and on the persuasive abilities of our field workers.
Most of all, a good field worker should be able to interact positively with strangers of all social classes. Being multilingual—in Philippine languages, not mere dialects—is an asset. Her physical appearance and dress should be pleasing, but not so unusual as to distract respondents from paying attention to the questions and answering them carefully.
She should be healthy, sturdy, and mobile—able and willing to travel via land, water, and air, in weather good or bad. Her family circumstances should be flexible enough to enable her to be absent for days, sometimes weeks, at a time—like a military soldier!
Like a soldier, she will follow questionnaire guidelines to the letter, in the prescribed sequence, with no ad libs or idle comments. She will realize how these can affect the mission of a survey.
She will have a strong sense of personal integrity and honesty—to respect the confidentiality of respondents’ identities and of the entirety of their responses. She will behave like a hospital staff member—patients’ data are absolutely secret; getting them into the wrong hands might endanger a life.
She never falsifies an interview, not even a small part of an it. It’s like taking money, no matter how little, from a cash register: if you get caught once, you’re fired.
The heart of the matter is that surveying, or asking information from other persons (who are strangers) about themselves, is a very touchy person-to-person affair. Women happen to be more effective than men in asking serious questions and getting honest answers.
It is no wonder that many of the Filipino survey research pioneers were women, who went on to establish the Marketing and Opinion Research Society of the Philippines. March is a good month to salute them!
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mahar.mangahas@sws.org.ph
