HKU POP: Public Sentiment Index recovers slightlyBack

(1) “2013 Sha Tin District Council Tin Sum Constituency By-election Guessing Game” was launched

The “PopCon” e-platform (http://popcon.hk) hosted by the Public Opinion Programme (POP) at the University of Hong Kong is now running the “2013 Sha Tin District Council Tin Sum Constituency By-election Guessing Game”, users can now make guesses on the result of the Sha Tin District Council Tin Sum Constituency By-election due to take place on March 10, until 00:00AM on the election day.

(2) “PopVote Civil Referendum Project” kicks off again and calls for public donations

POP at the University of Hong Kong and Centre for Social Policy Studies at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University jointly held a press conference some time ago to introduce the future development of the “PopVote Civil Referendum Project”, as well as to invite donations of HKD800,000 from public to construct and enhance the e-Voting system. The general public can log onto the "Donate Now" page of the "PopVote" website (http://popvote.hk) and leave their contact information if they wish to make a donation.

The Public Sentiment Index (PSI) compiled by POP aims at quantifying Hong Kong people’s sentiments, in order to explain and predict the likelihood of collective behaviour. PSI comprises 2 components: one being Government Appraisal (GA) Score and the other being Society Appraisal (SA) Score. GA refers to peoples’ appraisal of society’s governance while SA refers to peoples’ appraisal of the social environment. Both GA and SA scores are compiled from a variety of opinion survey figures. All PSI, GA and SA scores range between 0 to 200, with 100 meaning normal, the grading reference of the scores are shown below. For methodological detailed please refer to the HKU POP Site at http://hkupop.pori.hk.

POP started to pilot study the “Public Sentiment Index” in year 2010 in collaboration with NowTV. The first survey was conducted in June 2010, followed by a series of monthly tracking surveys in 2011. There were altogether 13 surveys, covered by 11 releases from March 2011 to January 2012. All results have been uploaded to the POP Site.

At the end of June 2012, before the 15th anniversary of the handover of Hong Kong, POP officially released a “PSI analysis” with figures dating back to 1992, spanning over 20 years. Moreover, the frequency of the study was set at twice a month. In October 2012, echoing the start of a new Legislative Council, POP decided to set the cut-off date of all PSI analyses at the Sunday proceeding every 15th and last day of month, whereas the release date was set at the first Thursday following the cut-off date, except under special circumstances.

Cut-off date of the PSI figures released by POP today is February 24, 2013, while that of the next round of release will be March 10, 2013. The tentative release date for the next release will be March 14, 2013 (Thursday).

The PSI released by POP today shows that as of February 24, 2013, the latest Public Sentiment Index (PSI) is 75.8, up 2.7 from early-February. As for the Government Appraisal (GA), the score is 88.4, up 4.0 from early-February, while that of the Society Appraisal (SA) remains unchanged at 77.3 because no new survey has been conducted. The monthly average charts of PSI, GA and SA are shown below:

As for the meaning of the score values, please refer to the following:

Recent PSI, GA and SA figures are tabulated as follows:

[1] Starting from 2013, POP will adopt the latest published “SA score” directly for those periods with no new data collected for the “SA” related topics.

Recent average PSI, GA and SA figures per month are tabulated as follows:

Edward Chit-Fai Tai, Senior Data Analyst of Public Opinion Programme, observed, “At the end of February, Hong Kong’s Public Sentiment Index has slightly recovered, mainly because the Government Appraisal Score representing peoples’ appraisal of society’s governance has somewhat recovered. However, the monthly PSI of February is still lower than that of January. Looking back, the latest monthly PSI is now at record low since May 2004, and is far below the normal level (of 100), which deserves some attention. As for the reasons affecting the ups and downs of these figures, we leave it to our readers to form their own judgment using detailed records displayed in the ‘Opinion Daily’ of our POP Site.”

• March 14, 2013 (Thursday) 1pm to 2pm

Please refer to the HKU POP Site at http://hkupop.pori.hk.

• Online resource: “PSI” methodological notes (Chinese Only)

• Online chart: PSI (per month) (1992-2013)

• Online table: PSI (per month) (1992-2013)

• Online table: PSI (per release) (7/2012 – 2/2013)