on the Public Ranking of Universities in Hong Kong 2008Back

1. The full report of this survey can be browsed at the HKU POP SITE, address being http://hkupop.pori.hk

2. As an opinion survey, the findings of this survey are meant to reflect the perception of the general public of various tertiary institutions in Hong Kong. They are neither results of objective appraisals nor professional assessments.

3. This survey has mainly adopted the method of absolute rating according to individual attributes, rather than relative ranking. It is more conducive to profile analysis of relative strength and weaknesses for individual institutions. Readers should not over-emphasize the relative ranking of different institutions.

4. The researcher is aware POP itself is part of The University of Hong Kong, which is one of the institutions rated by respondents.? In order to eliminate any possible bias due to social desirability effect, all respondents were specifically told at the beginning of the interview that POP was an independent research body, and that they should simply report what they honestly felt, otherwise the result would not be meaningful.

5. In order to eliminate any possible bias due to the ordering of answers, the sequence of prompting the respondents with the name of the nine institutions was randomly rotated across all rating questions.

6. The researcher believes that this survey has been conducted fairly, objectively, and scientifically. The research instrument and survey findings are fully open for public scrutiny. We welcome open comments and validation study by other research bodies.