There's something confusing about numbers from Eastbridge's confidence index survey. Though confidence for the voluntary market is generally down, the majority of respondents (86 percent) still believe the industry's voluntary sales will increase over the next 12 months. That's just slightly down from the 87 percent who believed this as of December 2010.

But, Eastbridge President Gil Lowerre says, "while the total percentage is about the same, the percentage thinking that sales will 'increase a lot' went down significantly. Because of this the mean for this question decreased to 4.07, down from 4.16. This, taken with other dips in the key index measures, contributed to a dip in the overall index number to 98.4."

And there was a large increase in the percentage of respondents expecting a negative impact to sales from the economy—53 percent of respondents feel there will be a negative impact, up from just 33 percent as of December 2010.

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"Most see 'some negative impact' as opposed to major impacts and fewer see a positive impact—just 28 percent compared to 47 percent at the end of 2010," says Bonnie Brazzell, Eastbridge vice president.

The Voluntary Industry Confidence Index study is conducted semi-annually and includes responses from individuals active in the market—carriers, brokers and vendors. Like other confidence indices, the index is a single number that compares the current results to a baseline measure. The first Confidence Index survey was completed in December of 2005; the results from that survey serve as the "base" year (meaning the index was at 100 for that year).

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