Silver lining of hope: Sparkwinn Research captures pulse after Easter attacks

Colombo’s streets slowly regain a sense of normalcy, as people feel more secure on the measures undertaken to degrade terrorist’s capacity to harm. People return to work, shops re-open as the city recovers from the collective trauma that made public feel anxious about national security as the series of events unfolded last week.

Confidence in travelling to work safely increased from 10% on 23 April (two days after the attack) to 30% on 28th April (a week after the attack), according to a poll conducted by Sparkwinn Research on Twitter. 

The poll was carried out to capture people’s sentiments following the aftermath of Easter Sunday massacre. However, more than three-fourths of the survey participants expressed feeling unsafe to go to a movie theatre, thus clearly indicating people are exercising caution and not yet comfortable in engaging in entertainment related activities/public outings. 

Public slowly regains confidence to return to normalcy

Opinion on national security lapses 

Leadership failure was highlighted as the leading cause of the mishap that took away innocent lives too early; one-third of the participants worried about future acts of terrorism in the country. Therefore, it is necessary to implement effective and timely counter-terrorism policies to make locals and tourists feel safer and confident about their security. 

Recovery and healing will depend on how effectively governments, businesses and civilians manage the crisis from a security perspective by being vigilant, while taking the right measures at the right time. Thus, mitigate security risks in the future. Social media is banned for over a week now, but nearly 60% of people polled for the survey feel, it is ok to use proxy measures such as VPN to access social media irrespective of its intended purpose.

Extremism resulted due to incorrect religious beliefs/knowledge

Over two-thirds 3rd of the people responded to the opinion poll stating the attacks were as a result of religious extremism, resulting from incorrect religious beliefs/knowledge.  

(Note: The opinion poll was conducted on Twitter between 23 and 29 April. The intention of the survey was to gauge public sentiments following the Easter attacks that took place in Sri Lanka on 21 April. It must be noted that the poll was conducted among those who were active online, and with limited sample size, which confines to taking any decision representatively.)

(Sparkwinn Research is an independent research agency that focuses on studying consumer and social issues to provide data centric insights to brands and public.)