In view of numerous enquiries from both print and electronic media made to the Public Opinion Programme (POP) at the University of Hong Kong, asking for Director Robert Chung's response to the criticism made by Hao Tiechuan, Director of the Publicity, Cultural and Sports Department of the Liaison Office of the Central People's Government in Hong Kong, on the "latest survey on Hong Kong people's ethnic identity", Director Robert Chung hereby issues this document to the press to explain the design of the survey in one go (such explanations have been sent to individual media via email immediately upon their enquiry, there is never any issue of "non-response" from POP):
- POP welcomes all serious discussions on the methodology of public opinion research, in order to gather collective wisdom. However, academic discussions should remain on the academic level and should not include any political concern. Rigorous academic discussions should be able to comprehensively reveal the pros and cons of our surveys.
- Conerning the use of a dichotomy of "Hong Kong citizens" versus "Chinese citizens" to measure Hong Kong people's ethnic identity, POP has already explained its pros and cons in its press releases over the years. Many years ago, POP added 6 individual rating items in its surveys to solve the problem. Recently, POP also constructed "identity indexes" to describe Hong Kong people's "ethnic identity" from various angles. The following is an excerpt from yesterday's press release:
- Because the concepts of "Hong Kong citizens", "Chinese Hong Kong citizens", "Chinese citizens" and "Hong Kong Chinese citizens" may overlap with each other, and making a one-in-four choice may not reflect the actual strengths of one's ethnic identities, POP has right from the beginning conducted parallel tests on the strengths of people's separate identities as "Hong Kong citizens" and "Chinese citizens" using a scale of 0-10. In June 2007, POP expanded its study to include four new identities for strength rating……
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Taking the geometric mean of the strength and importance ratings of each respondent and then multiply it by 10, we have an "identity index" for the respondent for a certain identity between 0 and 100, with 0 meaning no feeling, 100 meaning extremely strong feeling, and 50 meaning half and half. Using these identity indices, the rank order of Hong Kong people's six identities were "Hong Kong citizens", "members of the Chinese race", "Asians", "Chinese citizens", "global citizens" and "citizens of PRC". Their scores were 79.1, 72.5, 72.1, 67.9, 67.0 and 61.1 marks respectively.
- The dichotomy of "Hong Kong citizens" versus "Chinese citizens" as a research instrument was widely used by local sociologists in 1980s, it was not invented by POP. Anybody can easily verify this. Since its establishment in 1991, POP has already enhanced the instrument a lot by adding separate ratings and importance ratings, as well as constructing different "identity indexes".
- Since individual ratings would not interfere with each other, POP welcomes other research institutes to add "British citizens" or other identities to their studies for comparison.
Director of POP Robert Chung reiterates that academic discussions should remain on the academic level, and not include any political objective or concern. |
