Archarn Sukhum Chaleysub stands at the entrance of the Suan Dusit Poll building on the main Suan Dusit campus in Bangkok. |
Going commercial has not met with universal acclaim. Critics openly question how Suan Dusit can maintain the integrity of its academic programmes with so many seemingly non-academic activities to oversee. School administrators counter that these activities are very much a part of the academic programme and they give students valuable experience not found in most other institutions.
One enterprise that has won widespread public acceptance from all sides is the highly-respected Suan Dusit Poll headed by well-known researcher Assistant Professor Sukhum Chaleysub. Operating in large part as the laboratory for Suan Dusit 3000-student information science programme, there is little question of the agency’s academic value.
But the Suan Dusit Poll is also very much a business with a staff of 25 professionals. Each year it conducts dozens of polls and surveys, many of them commissioned by government and commercial organisations.
Information science laboratory
According to Archarn Sukhum, the Suan Dusit Poll was first established to help students meet the faculty’s requirement of 700 hours of field work and occupational training.
"During these 700 hours, students gain experience in constructing databases and conducting survey research," Archarn Sukhum explains. "This is similar to a laboratory in other subjects."
Familiarity with polling techniques and the statistical analysis involved, Archarn Sukhum says, will greatly enhance students’ job prospects. It will allow many students to set up their own businesses and it will also provide them with the foundation for post-graduate study.
At Suan Dusit, information science majors participate in a wide variety of surveys, many of them student designed. Some are local in scope while others involve the whole country. All of them use methodologies that have been adapted to Thai society.
This, Archarn Sukhum explains, generally means a larger sample size than would be found in Western countries. "To get a reliability of 95 percent accuracy, i.e., a margin of error of five percent or less, some countries abroad use a sample size of 400 and up. Here in Thailand, the differences in people’s level of education, income, and way of thinking requires us to obtain a larger sample.
"If the polls involve the general public and cover an issue that affects the whole country, we use about 3,000 respondents. If it is confined to the Bangkok metropolitan area, we use between 1200 to 1500," he says.
High-profile polling
According to Archarn Sukhum, Suan Dusit polls have a broader purpose than merely providing students with practical academic training. Society also benefits, he says, since scientific polling helps Thailand enter the information age. "Thai people have traditionally tended to be introspective," he says, "doing their own thinking and forming their own opinions without having accurate information. They are unfamiliar with the importance of using reliable data in the decision-making process.
"Thus to raise awareness, we conduct opinion surveys on hit songs and we do surveys for Khun Traiphop’s programmes in order to instill the idea in people that sometimes they need to base their ideas on good information. Otherwise, you can get very low quality results," he says.
According to Archarn Sukhum, carrying out high-profile polls and surveys is an excellent way of generating public interest and awareness. Archarn Sukhum cites as an example the polling his agency did for the TV pool and Channel 7 in determining last year’s favourite TV performer.
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Many of the agency's surveys are commissioned by outside organisations. Here, staff members key in data on customer perceptions of the service they received at the various branches of a large commercial bank. |
"In the past," explains Archarn Sukhum, "There was a great deal of favouritism and pressure from various television organisations in the selection process. We joined in on the condition that they must use our results. If our survey indicated that the people liked a particular star best, the programme organisers were not allowed to pick someone else. The response that we got was that people accepted that the result of the 2001 contest was transparent."
Suan Dusit Poll results are often reported in the news media. That was again the case last month when Archarn Sukhum and his pollsters set out to find out if the general suspicion that there is an increase of sexual activity on Valentine’s Day is really true.
"We attempted to find out by interviewing at 200-300 drug stores on the following day, February 15. We asked if there was an unusual increase in sales of condoms on Valentines Day. We went to short-time hotels and asked the staff there if there was an increase in activity. We also asked who were the kinds of people using the hotels’ services."
The results, as reported by the Bangkok Post, indicated that "sales of condoms and pregnancy prevention pills increased 24 percent and 9.5 percent respectively. Love motels enjoyed a 24 percent increase in occupancy with the number of teenage customers increasing by 17 percent."
Hot issues
The Suan Dusit Poll has won much of its public reputation by conducting polls on hot issues of the day, particularly hot political issues. Recently, however, the agency has also been conducting polls on environmental, health and social issues.
"But, says Archarn Sukhum, "when we do polls on such issues we find that it generates most interest among international or English language publications.
Sometimes, the Thai media will not pay attention at all. At the same time, Reuters will telephone to request the data and the Bangkok Post or the Nation will report the results — an interesting point for us to consider."
The Thai public and media did, however, pay attention to a series of polls his agency conducted on one particularly important social issue – education. That polling took place during the time legislators were drafting the National Education Act of 1999.
Together with the Educational Council of Thailand, the Suan Dusit Poll solicited the public’s opinion on a variety of aspects covered in the law from child-centred learning to the number of years that education should be compulsory. Politicians took notice, said Archarn Sukhum, and partly as a result of the polling data they had received, they passed a law which called for sweeping reforms in the Thai educational system.
Exactly how to implement those reforms is one of today’s most contentious issues, an issue which often finds the Education Minister at odds with the Education Reform Council. Unfortunately, says Archarn Sukhum, "conducting surveys on this controversial issue is beyond the mandate of our poll. We have a problem since we are a government agency under the Education Minister. So we really don’t have independence here."
Out of bounds as well are polls on the monarchy, religion, the judicial system, and for a very different reason, social issues like gambling on the upcoming World Cup. "There are huge profits to be made, so the local mafia is very involved. Stirring up public awareness on this issue can be dangerous for those collecting data," says Archarn Sukhum.
terryfrd@ksc15.th.com |