SWS survey: 65% of Filipinos find Muslim brothers, sisters as trustworthy as other Pinoys

MANILA, Philippines — Sixty five percent of Filipinos find their Muslim brothers and sisters  as trustworthy as any other Filipino they have met, a Social Weather Stations (SWS) survey released on Friday showed.

According to the survey, a record-high 65 percent of respondents said that Muslims are trustworthy — a combined 28 percent who ‘strongly agreed’ and 37 percent who ‘somewhat agree’.

 Of the 1,200 respondents, 22 percent said they are ‘undecided’, while only seven percent and five percent said they ‘somewhat disagree’ and ‘strongly disagree’, respectively.  This means that the net score in terms of trust towards Muslim Filipinos is at its highest level of +52.

The 65 percent who said Muslim Filipinos are trustworthy edges the result of the March 2015 survey, where 53 percent of the respondents made the affirmation resulting in a +29 net score.

SWS also showed that during the same polling period for the survey on trust towards Muslims — from March 26 to 29 — they also asked respondents as to whether they trust members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community.

LGBT community

In a different report for the survey on the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community, 79 percent of the respondents said they trust gays or lesbians as much as they trust other Filipinos, while 73 percent said that the said community has contributed a lot to nation-building.

There are still some Filipinos, however, who think that HIV/AIDS is an ailment confined to members of the LGBT community — at 43 percent — despite straight men and women also getting infected.

There were also 40 percent who said that they would want to LGBT members within their family to become straight men and women, while 26 percent claimed that “being gay or lesbian is contagious”.

SWS said that they interviewed the respondents subdivided into locales.  Sampling error is at ±2.8 percent.

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