By Ellalyn De Vera-Ruiz
The number of adult Filipinos who viewed their present lives positively in 2018, slightly dipped from the same period in 2017, a survey conducted by the Social Weather Stations (SWS) showed.
(SWS.ORG.PH / MANILA BULLETIN)
In its fourth quarter 2018 survey fielded from December 16 to 19, 2018 with 1,440 respondents, SWS found that 86 percent of adult Filipinos rated their present life by a positive number, 4 percent rated it by the neutral number zero, and 10 percent rated it by a negative number.
This translates to a mean nationwide Anamnestic Comparative Self-Assessment (ACSA) rating of +2.60.
It was lower than the 2017 mean ACSA rating of +2.82 (87 percent rated their lives positively, 6 percent rated it a neutral zero, and 7 percent rated it negatively).
The December 2018 survey marks the second time the ACSA scale has been applied in a national survey of well-being in the Philippines.
The first time it was applied was in the December 2017 survey.
SWS said ACSA was developed by Belgian oncologist Jan Bernheim and originally used for measuring the well-being of cancer patients under treatment. The term anamnestic means “based on memory,” describing a comparison with the respondents’ best and worst personal memories of the past.
The ACSA survey question specifically asked respondents to place the past two weeks of their present lives on a scale from -5 to +5, where -5 means “as bad as the worst period personally experienced in my life” and +5 means “as good as the best period personally experienced in my life.”
The respondents are shown the ACSA scale of 11 points: -5, -4, -3, -2, -1, 0, +1, +2, +3, +4 and +5, laid out horizontally. (Ellalyn De Vera-Ruiz)