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The acting manager at SIB's Economic Statistics Department explains more about how the survey is conducted and how the findings are used.

Jaqueline Sabal, Ag. Manager, Economic Statistics Dept.
"What we're asking, it's technically a perception study, and we're asking persons how they feel. It's a fairly short survey, it's just 10 questions and we're asking them how they feel about their financial situation, general economic conditions and then also about savings, whether they think prices will increase, if they think unemployment will increase, etc., so it's fairly short. What we use to compile the index is just 7 out of those 10 questions and of the 7 questions we separate them into the present index, expectations, and the durable goods. The present deals with your present financial situation, present economic situations, etc., expectations is what you think will happen in the future, 12 months from now, with regards to the same things, your financial situation and economic conditions, and then the durable goods question is about whether consumers think now is the right time to make major purchases of durable goods so we're asking about if now is the right time to buy, build, or renovate a home, purchase a car, furniture, those types of items that require a lot of intent and thought before making that big purchase. The results are weighted to our adult population, so they're representative of the adult population that we have. We have not released an index for November, I think the most recent one was in October."

"What we want to use the index for is to look at, it should be as like a forecast of what will happen in the future. So for SIB's purposes, because private household consumption is such a major part of GDP. If we're able to find out if persons are feeling optimistic, the belief is that they're likely to spend money which means economic activity will increase so if people are optimistic, they're spending more money economic activity will increase, then you can expect to see economic growth. So what we want to do with the index at the SIB is use it as a gauge for what will happen in the future. We're trying to collect a few more percentage points of data because it's a fairly new survey. I think we're up at about a year now but we want to have a good data series to make proper trends with to be able to see if the index is doing what the expectations are of it. So based on research that we've done, the methodology that we're using, we still need to do that long term analysis from the index."