Research DesignBack

1 Stage One: Quantitative Telephone Survey of the General Public

1.1 The target population of this part was Cantonese-speaking population of Hong Kong aged 15 or above. To minimize sampling bias, the following sampling technique was adopted:

Telephone numbers were first drawn randomly from the residential telephone directories as "seed numbers", from which another set of numbers was generated using the "plus/minus one/two" method, in order to capture the unlisted numbers. Duplicated numbers were then filtered, and the remaining numbers were mixed in random order to produce the final telephone sample.

1.2 When telephone contact was successfully established with a target household, one person aged 15 or above was selected. If more than one subject had been available, selection was made using the "next birthday rule" which selected the person who had his/her birthday next from all those present. The demographic profile of the respondents has been presented in Appendix 1.

1.3 Telephone interviews were carried out from 1830 to 2230 hours between 28 September and 5 October 2001. Data were collected by interviewers using a Computer Assisted Telephone Interviews (CATI) system under close supervision.

1.4 As shown from the detailed breakdown of the contact information, amongst the 7,678 telephone numbers sampled for the survey, 889 were found to be invalid lines, 2,309 were non-contacts, including busy lines and no answer, while another 306 were business lines, 584 were fax lines or with answering machines. Of the 3,590 valid contacts, the numbers of refusals (without knowing whether target respondents were qualified or not), disqualified and unfinished cases with appointment dates beyond the end of fieldwork period were 808, 91 and 275 respectively. Besides, 61 were incomplete due to unexpected termination of interviews, 800 have language and other problems, and the remaining 1,555 were successful cases.

1.5 To sum up, a total of 1,555 Hong Kong residents aged 15 or above were successfully interviewed in this survey. The effective response rate was 64.2% as shown in the following calculation. The standard sampling error for percentages based on this sample was less than 1.3 percentage points.

1.6 To improve the representativeness of the results, all data in the first part of this study have been weighted according to the age and gender distribution of the Hong Kong population as reported in the 2001 Population Census. Due to the weighting effect, all individual figures reported in the following sessions have been adjusted and might not round up to a hundred percent in some tables.

2 Stage Two: Quantitative Telephone Survey of Service Recipients

2.1 Telephone interview during office hours was adopted to collect all data required. A list of organizations was compiled from the results of the telephone survey of the general public when respondents were asked to name the organizations that they had provided services with. Additional contacts were supplied by the client as extracted from their Volunteer Referral Programme. The demographic profile of the respondents has been presented in Appendix 9.

2.2 Telephone interviews were carried out from 1200 to 1800 hours between 24 October and 5 November 2001. In line with the previous stage, data were collected by interviewers using a Computer Assisted Telephone Interviews (CATI) system under close supervision.

2.3 As shown from the detailed breakdown of the contact information, amongst the 377 telephone numbers sampled for the survey, 18 were found to be invalid lines, 51 were non-contacts, including busy lines and no answer, while another 3 were business lines, 27 were fax lines or answering machines. Of the 278 valid contacts, the numbers of refusals (without knowing whether target respondents were qualified or not), disqualified and unfinished cases with appointment dates beyond the end of fieldwork period were 5, 12 and 53 respectively. Besides, 4 have language and other problems, while the remaining 204 were successful cases.

2.3 Organization representatives who had ever received volunteering services before the time of interview were defined as the target population of this part. To sum up, a total of 204 respondents were successfully interviewed in the survey. The overall response rate was 97.6% and the standard error due to sampling was no more than 3.5 percentage points.

2.4 The data collected in the second part were presented in raw figures and no weighting technique was applied.

3 Stage Three: Qualitative Focus Group Studies

Totally two sessions of focus groups were conducted. The target participants for each group were a) existing volunteers, and b) organization representatives who had ever received volunteer services before the time of interview. A total of 40 participants took part in these two focus groups. Both volunteers and organization representatives were first approached by staff at AVS by phone. After the respondents had accepted the invitation, the POP team would send them a confirmation letter to each of them, and phone calls were made one day before the group session to serve as reminders.

3.1 Each focus group session consisted of two parts, namely a brief PowerPoint presentation of the survey results and an open discussion, which lasted for about one and a half hour in total.

3.2 The first group was conducted at Duke of Windsor Social Service Building in Wanchai on 21 December, 2001. There were 32 participants in the group and they were all volunteers referred by AVS. To equip them with appropriate information, highlights of findings as extracted from the "Study on Public's Reception and Perception of Volunteer Services (Stage One)" were presented to the participants by Dr CHUNG Ting-yiu. Then, all participants were invited to express their opinions, attitudes and suggestions freely.

3.3 The second group was conducted at Duke of Windsor Social Service Building on 31 January, 2002. From Stage One of this study, a list of recipient organizations was compiled as cited by the respondents who had participated in organized volunteering before (Question 6). Some additional contacts were supplied by AVS to enlarge the pool. Representatives of over 300 organizations concerned were then approached by POP team members and aided by staff at AVS at a later stage. At last, 8 organization representatives accepted the invitation and attended the discussion. Similarly, a brief presentation on the result highlights of the "Study on Public's Reception and Perception of Volunteer Services (Stage Two)" was conduced by Dr CHUNG. They were then invited to express their views on the ways to improve the services provided by the volunteer provider agencies and the local development of volunteering.

3.4 With the participants' consent, the whole discussion was recorded on cassette tapes. Please refer to Appendices 16 for the full transcriptions of both sessions.