HKU POP SITE releases the latest popularity ratings of the top ten Legislative CouncillorsBack

The Public Opinion Programme (POP) at the University of Hong Kong today releases on schedule via the "HKU POP SITE" (http://hkupop.pori.hk) the latest popularity ratings of the top ten Legislative Councillors. POP's normal practice is to release the results of our regular surveys every Tuesday at 2 pm via our POP Site, except during public holidays, each time with a forecast of the items to be released in the forthcoming week. We will review and adjust this operation regularly.

According to this schedule, the date and time of our next release will be November 26, 2002, Tuesday, at 2 pm, the latest results on the rating of CE Tung Chee-hwa, people's appraisal of the performance of the HKSAR Government and members of the Legislative Council in general will be released.

As regards the latest (November 1-5) popularity ratings of the top ten Legislative Councillors, the top three were Lau Chin-shek, Lee Cheuk-yan and Rita Fan, attaining 60.6, 57.9 and 56.8 marks respectively. Selina Chow and Szeto Wah ranked fourth and fifth, with support ratings of 56.2 and 53.4 marks respectively. The sixth to the tenth ranks fell to Emily Lau, Martin Lee, Andrew Wong, James Tien and Jasper Tsang correspondingly. The mean score obtained by the top five councillors was 57.0 marks, while that for the top ten was 54.7 marks. When compared with the figures captured in early August, both averages have dropped, by 1.2 and 0.9 marks respectively, which were not statistically significant.

The research design of our "Top 10 Legislative Councillors" has been explained in detail under "Survey Method" in our corresponding web page. The top councillors listed in our latest survey were all those who obtained highest unprompted mentions in our first stage naming survey conducted in mid-October (October 13-16). In that survey, respondents could name, unaided, up to 10 legislators whom they knew best. Martin Lee, Emily Lau, Szeto Wah, Jasper Tsang and Rita Fan were mentioned most frequently. Please refer to the relevant table for the rest of the list. Those twelve who were named most frequently were then entered into the second stage rating survey. During the second stage rating survey, which was conducted in early November, respondents were asked to rate each legislator in turn using a 0-100 scale. 0 indicates absolutely no support, 100 indicates absolute support, and 50 means half-half. After calculation, the bottom two legislators in terms of recognition rate were dropped, leaving behind the top 10. For easy reference, the POP Site has already displayed the results of all naming surveys conducted since year 1998.

All new surveys reported in the POP Site today are random telephone surveys conducted by interviewers, targeting at Cantonese speakers in Hong Kong of age 18 or above. The sample size of all surveys is over 1,000 respondents. At 95% confidence level, the sampling error of the top 10 legislators is less than plus/minus 1.4 marks, while that for percentages in the naming survey is less than plus/minus 3 percentage points. That means if we were to repeat a certain survey 100 times, using the same questions each time but with different random samples, we would expect 95 times getting a figure within the error margins specified. Shall anyone have any question regarding the research design of the surveys published in the POP Site, members of the POP Team will be happy to answer them, but we will not comment on the findings at this stage. Such an arrangement would be reviewed when more resources are available. Please note that Dr CHUNG Ting-yiu Robert, Director of Public Opinion Programme, is solely responsible for the work published in the POP Site, which does not represent the stand of the University of Hong Kong.