HKU POP SITE releases regular survey findings today, and forecasts all dates of release in DecemberBack

The Public Opinion Programme (POP) at The University of Hong Kong today releases, as scheduled, via its website the "HKU POP SITE" (http://hkupop.pori.hk) the popularity rating of the most well-known political groups, people's satisfaction with the performance of Legislative Councillors, as well as Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa's latest popularity rating. Since October 30, the POP Site has been releasing findings of its regular surveys about once every two weeks. Two weeks from now, however, will be Christmas holiday. The POP Site has adjusted its schedule of data release for the rest of the month as follows:

On December 17, Monday, at 2 pm, it will release people's trust of the Central and HKSAR Governments, people's confidence in the future of China, Hong Kong, and one country two systems.

On December 27, Thursday, at 2 pm, it will release the result of the 2001 year-ender survey, people's satisfaction with the SAR Government, and Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa's latest popularity rating.

In September 1996, POP started to publish its survey findings regularly via its monthly newsletter, the "POP Express". Frequent releases of "POP Express Extra Issues" were later added. However, due to a number of reasons, these activities stopped by the end of 1999 and 2000 respectively, with their functions gradually taken over by the POP Site. Resources permit, the POP Site will gradually increase the frequency and content of its data releases. Shall anyone have any question regarding the research design of the surveys published in the POP Site, our team members will be happy to answer them, but we will not comment on the findings at this stage. Such an arrangement would be reviewed when we have more resources. Please note that Dr CHUNG Ting-yiu Robert, Director of Public Opinion Programme, is solely responsible for the works published in the POP Site, which does not represent the stand of the University of Hong Kong.

For quite a long time, POP has advocated that when covering opinion surveys, the media should follow the rules of minimum disclosure, whereby key information like target population, dates of fieldwork, sample size, whether the sample was drawn randomly, response rate, and sampling errors should also be reported. (Please refer to the POP Site under "Code of Practice" for more information.) However, although such information has been given in the POP Site for all its surveys, the media may have difficulty using it. POP would like to offer some suggestions here.

Example One: In reporting POP's latest ratings of the most well-known political groups, it could be mentioned that "the survey was conducted by POP in the middle of last month, over a thousand people aged 18 or above were interviewed by telephone at random, with a response rate of 67% … at 95% confidence level, the sampling errors of political groups' recognition rates were less than 3 percentage points, while those of support ratings were less than 1.8 marks."

Example Two: In reporting people's satisfaction with the performance of Legislative Councillors, it could be mentioned that "the survey was conducted by POP at the beginning of last month, over a thousand people aged 18 or above were interviewed by telephone at random, with a response rate of 64% … at 95% confidence level, the sampling error was less than 3 percentage points."

Example Three: In reporting Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa's latest rating, it could be mentioned that "the survey was conducted by POP in the middle of last month, over a thousand people aged 18 or above were interviewed by telephone at random, with a response rate of 67% … at 95% confidence level, the sampling error of the latest rating was less than 1.3 marks, statistically without much change since mid-August."

"At 95% confidence level" means that if we were to conduct the same survey 100 times, using the same question in each survey but with different random samples, we would expect 95 times getting a score within the error margins specified. The margin of error at 95% confidence level is twice the standard error calculated. POP will continue to explain these statistical concepts via its POP Site.