Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, December 21) — A poll conducted by the Social Weather Stations showed 62% of Filipinos believe their quality of life worsened since the pandemic started. The survey, conducted from November 21-25, was the first face-to-face interviews since the start of the crisis.
In its report published on Monday, the SWS said the net gainers score taken from the survey (meaning the percent of gainers minus the percent of losers) was at -48, classified by the SWS as “extremely low.”
However, it added, “The November 2020 Net Gainer score is up by 28 points from the catastrophic -76 in September 2020, softening SWS’s worst survey trend that started during the Covid-19 crisis when Net Gainers fell to catastrophic levels of -78 in May 2020 and -72 in July 2020.”
But the SWS also said Metro Manila still remained at catastrophic, but that eased to extremely low in Balance Luzon (areas in Luzon that are not Metro Manila) and Mindanao.
It also noted that hunger was also greater in areas where more people said their quality of life got worse.
“The November 2020 survey found that 16.0% or an estimated 4.0 million families experienced involuntary hunger due to lack of food to eat at least once in the past three months,” the SWS said.
Additionally, the pollster said of those surveyed, 48% of families rated themselves as Poor, 36% feeling Borderline Poor, and only 16% feeling Not Poor.
The SWS explained, “The Self-Rated Poor are those who belong to households whose heads rated their family as poor or mahirap. This status is then adopted for all members of the household.”
The survey was done face-to-face and involved 1,500 adults nationwide. Broken down, the numbers are 600 in Balance Luzon and 300 each in Metro Manila, Visayas, and Mindanao.
