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The Public Opinion Programme (POP) of the University of Hong Kong was established in June 1991 to collect and study public opinion on topics that could be of interest to academics, journalists, policy-makers, and the general public. POP was at first under the Social Sciences Research Centre, a unit under the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Hong Kong, and was transferred to the Journalism and Media Studies Centre in the University of Hong Kong in May 2000. In January 2002, it was transferred back to the Faculty of Social Sciences in the University of Hong Kong. Since its establishment, POP has been conducting opinion researches on various social and political issues and providing quality survey services to a wide range of organizations provided that they agreed to publicizing the findings to the general public, allow the POP Team to design and conduct the research independently, and to release the findings for public consumption finally.
 
In December 2003, the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI) and POP reached an agreement to co-organize a "Multi-party Opinion Survey on Political Development in Hong Kong" for the first time, in order to provide to local political parties data on public opinion on various political issues, and to encourage constructive exchange between parties. NDI sponsored the survey, while POP was fully responsible for designing the survey and conducting the fieldwork, quality control, data analysis and report compilation. With the same objectives, NDI sponsored the survey again in March 2004, using the same research methodology.
 
In line with the first survey, NDI and POP invited Hong Kong's four major political parties -- the Democratic Alliance for Betterment of Hong Kong, the Democratic Party, the Frontier and the Liberal Party -- to nominate up to five close-ended questions for the survey, with the understanding that the all parties will finally be given access to all data collected, and that the data will be made available for public consumption on, but not restricted to, an on-line platform. The Democratic Alliance for Betterment of Hong Kong did not join the survey, and NDI and POP proceeded with questions suggested by the three other parties, plus a set of question compiled by POP.