Datafolha celebrates 40 years of uniting scientific rigor and journalism – 04/30/2023 – Politics

“The stars never lie”, read a text on the cover of the Sheet on November 12, 1985, announcing that the newspaper had consulted the map of candidates for mayor of São Paulo.

Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s had Mercury at an angle of 35 degrees to the Sun; that of Jânio Quadros, Uranus with an aperture of 33 degrees; and, in Eduardo Suplicy’s, the number was 18 degrees.

It was an encrypted message from Datafolha. The publication of electoral polls had been prohibited on the eve of the election, and that was the way to publish the numbers. Janius won.

This is one of the 7,837 surveys already carried out by Datafolha, which involved a total of 12,034,339 interviews. The institute completes 40 years this Monday (1st), conducting an average of 196 surveys per year.

It is a vast collection about Brazil, which gathers, in addition to electoral polls, data on the opinion and behavior of Brazilians regarding various topics.

“Datafolha has become the gold standard of research in Brazil, both electoral and market. It has achieved this with hard work, ingenuity and the right refusal to work for parties and politicians, which gives the institute independence and credibility”, says Sérgio Dávila , editorial director of Sheet.

From recent data from the institute, for example, it is possible to know that Lula (PT) started the government with lower approval than in his previous terms (38%) and that 93% of Brazilians repudiate the January 8 attacks.

“Datafolha shows the transformation of Brazil in these 40 years”, says Luciana Chong, director of the institute, where she started as a researcher, more than 30 years ago.

The embryo of the institute was the Department of Research and Informatics of the Folha Group, which published the first survey on May 1, 1983.

The idea of ​​investing in opinion polls came from the then publisher of SheetOctavio Frias de Oliveira (1912-2007), “his” Frias.

The sociologist Reginaldo Prandi presented the businessman with a methodology to assess public opinion. Later, Prandi teamed up with fellow sociologists Antonio Manuel Teixeira Mendes and Antônio Flávio Pierucci to create a system that crosses geographic, social and income data.

All this at a time when the telephone system was terrible and many Brazilians did not even have a device at home. In this context, the researchers began to conduct the interviews in places of great circulation.

In short: it wasn’t astrology, it was a scientific method combined with journalism.

“Datafolha helped Brazil to get to know itself. That was the idea of ​​’seu’ Frias”, says Prandi.

He claims that Datafolha’s greatest enthusiasts were the publisher and Otavio Frias Filho (1957-2018), who led the modernization project launched by the newspaper in 1984 and directed the newsroom until his death.

The sociologist also says that, before, research companies treated the methodology as an industrial secret. Datafolha created a culture of transparency by breaking this secrecy, which helped to popularize statistical concepts, such as the margin of error.

“A Sheet democratized access to research information. Transparency was fundamental for the credibility of the institute”, says Antonio Manuel Teixeira Mendes, first director of Datafolha and former superintendent of Grupo Folha.

Among the outstanding researches is the survey on how racial prejudice manifests itself in Brazil, later published in the book “Racismo Cordial” (ed. Ática, 1995), and the series “DNA Paulistano”, on the relationship of residents of the capital of São Paulo with the city.

Electoral polls, on the other hand, pointed to trends in historical moments. In 1989, for example, Datafolha was the first to announce that Lula, not Leonel Brizola, would face Fernando Collor in the second round.

“The trajectory in those moments was always marked by the technical rigor associated with the agility that journalism demands”, says Mauro Paulino, who directed the institute from 1998 to 2022.

In this way, Datafolha was the target of politicians, with initiatives such as CPIs, bills and lawsuits to censor research.

The pressure intensified last year, with attacks by former president Jair Bolsonaro and his allies on the institutes. On the streets, researchers were intimidated during the campaign — and a Datafolha professional was even attacked.

“I had never seen anything like this before. But we managed to guarantee the main thing: the institute’s transparency, independence and reliability. This was greater than all these attacks”, says Luciana Chong.

Surveys became a reference for the market

In addition to electoral polls, Datafolha also operates in market research, showing companies what consumers think. One of those responsible for creating this area was Judith Brito, today the superintendent of Grupo Folha. She joined Datafolha as a project manager with that mission.

“Datafolha also lent prestige to market research”, she says. “This gave financial breath to the institute, which stopped being an arm of the Newsroom to become a business unit.”

One client today, for example, is Anbima (Brazilian Association of Financial and Capital Market Entities), for whom Datafolha conducts a survey “X-Ray of the Brazilian Investor” —which yielded important insights for the entity.

“Before, we did the research with classes A, B and C. As of 2021, we included classes D and E in the research and we found a non-negligible portion that manages to save and invest [20% em 2022]”, says Marcelo Billi, superintendent of Sustainability, Innovation and Education at Anbima.

The Lemann Foundation also reports insights from Datafolha surveys. Daniel Funcia de Bonis, director of Knowledge, Data and Research, recalls when the institution wanted to know how schools and students were doing during the pandemic.

“We approached Datafolha thinking about a survey that could be carried out over several waves”, he says. “We saw how the situation was unequal. Part of the students, especially in the South and Southeast, had access to the content of the classes, but the majority of students were deprived of this.”

This led the foundation to recommend sending printed, rather than digital, school supplies to students’ homes.

“The data also showed how [o fechamento] it was draining in terms of sociability, mental health, outlook on life. This was essential for us to anticipate the opening of schools. We closed this cycle last year, with ten survey waves.”