38% of Pinoys say their lives improved in Q1 of 2019 — SWS survey

The survey, done on March 28 to 31, revealed that among its 1,440 respondents, 38 percent of them believe that their lives improved, while 21 percent said their lives worsened. (File photo: Leif Inge Fosen/Unsplash)

The number of adult Filipinos who said their lives improved in the past 12 months has increased, the latest survey of the Social Weather Stations (SWS) published on Friday, May 24, showed.

The survey, done on March 28 to 31, revealed that among its 1,440 respondents, 38 percent of them believe that their lives improved, while 21 percent said it worsened. Those who said their lives improved were classified by the pollster as “gainers” and those who said otherwise as “losers.”

This result, the SWS noted, gives a net gainers score of “very high” +17, a five-point increase from December 2018’s “very high” +12.

“The Net Gainers score continues to improve for two quarters in a row after dropping to -2 (fair) in September 2018,” it said.

It reported that the upgrade in the net gainers score was due to increases in Visayas, Metro Manila, and Balance Luzon. However, it went down by two points in Mindanao, from “very high” +18 recorded last December to “very high” +16 in March 2019.

The same survey also found that half of adult Filipinos foresee that their personal quality of life will improve in the next 12 months, while only four percent of them said it will get worse. This resulted in a net personal optimists score of “excellent” +47, a seven-point increase from December’s +40.

Aside from this, the March 2019 survey also revealed that 45 percent of its respondents were optimistic that the country’s economy will be better in the next 12 months, while 10 percent were pessimistic about it.

This yielded a net economic optimists score of “excellent” +35, up by three points from the “excellent” +32 in December.

The survey used face-to-face interviews of their respondents, aged 18 years old and above, nationwide.

It has sampling error margins of plus-minus 2.6 percent for national percentages, and plus-minus five percent each for Balance Luzon, Metro Manila, Visayas, and Mindanao.

‘Wake-up call’ 

Presidential Spokesperson Salvador Panelo on Friday welcomed the results of the SWS survey, saying it once again emphasized that the Filipino people “see and appreciate the President [Rodrigo Roa Duterte]’s tireless efforts to improve and bring about genuine and positive change to the nation.”

He added that this is “another wake-up call” to the critics of the current administration “who continuously and deliberately ignore our achievements which redound to the benefit of the Filipino masses.”

Fueled by this positive outcome, the spokesman vowed that the Duterte administration will even work harder to “improve on the significant gains of the past three years during the remainder of PRRD’s term as Chief Executive.”