HKU POP releases figures of people's satisfaction with Legco members in general, the Hong Kong Police Force and the PLA Hong Kong GarrisonBack

The "PopCon" e-platform (http://popcon.hk) hosted by the Public Opinion Programme (POP) at the University of Hong Kong is now running the "CE Nomination Guessing Game", to measure users' intelligent guesses. For the "Taiwan Presidential Election Guessing Game" just completed, users' final guesses were Ma Ying-jeou 48%, Tsai Ing-wen 43% and James Soong 9%, which is not too far from the real result of 52%, 46% and 3%. This is worth studying. Meanwhile, for the "CE Nomination Guessing Game", the latest situation is that Henry Tang leads Leung Chun-ying and Albert Ho, with guestimates of 615, 250 and 212 nominations respectively.

The Public Opinion Programme (POP) of the University of Hong Kong interviewed 1,035 Hong Kong people between 14 and 28 December 2011 by means of a random telephone survey conducted by real interviewers. The survey shows that compared to three months ago, people's satisfaction with the overall performance of Legco members has significantly increased by 5 percentage points, back to the level registered at the end of 2010. Net satisfaction now stands at negative 32 percentage points, which has significantly improved by 10 percentage points compared to three months ago, probably because of the concerted effort of most Legco members in some livelihood and political issues, like opposing the increase in tariff by the two electricity companies, and expressing concerns on vote-rigging. (Note: The net popularity of the SAR Government for the same period is negative 25 percentage points, as published before.) As for the two disciplinary forces, the satisfaction rates of both Hong Kong Police Force and PLA Hong Kong Garrison have increased by 5 and 3 percentage points respectively. Their net popularity now stands at positive 49 and positive 47 percentage points respectively, while people's dissatisfaction with the PLA Hong Kong Garrison continues to remain near zero. Further analysis shows that "non-post 80s" respondents tend to be more satisfied with PLA Hong Kong Garrison than those "post 80s" respondents. It should be noted, however, that people's satisfaction with Legco members in general includes those returned by geographical as well as functional constituencies. The maximum sampling error of the survey is between +/-1 and +/-4 percentage points at 95% confidence level, response rate being 66%.

POP today releases on schedule via the "POP SITE" the latest figures of people's satisfaction with the performance of Legislative Council members in general, the Hong Kong Police Force (HKPF) and the People's Liberation Army Hong Kong Garrison (PLA). As a general practice, all figures have been weighted according to provisional figures obtained from the Census and Statistics Department regarding the gender-age distribution of the Hong Kong population in mid-year 2011. Herewith the contact information for the latest survey:

[6] Errors are calculated at 95% confidence level using full sample size. "95% confidence level" means that if we were to repeat a certain survey 100 times, using the same questions each time but with different random samples, we would expect 95 times getting a figure within the error margins specified.

Recent figures are summarized as follows:

[7] All error figures in the table are calculated at 95% confidence level. "95% confidence level" means that if we were to repeat a certain survey 100 times, using the same questions each time but with different random samples, we would expect 95 times getting a figure within the error margins specified. Media can state "sampling error of percentages not more than +/-4% at 95% confidence level" when quoting the above figures. The error margin of previous survey can be found at the POP Site.
[8] Collapsed from a 5-point scale. The mean value is calculated by quantifying all individual responses into 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 marks according to their degree of positive level, where 1 is the lowest and 5 the highest, and then calculate the sample mean.
[9] Such changes have gone beyond the sampling errors at the 95% confidence level, meaning that they are statistically significant prima facie. However, whether numerical differences are statistically significant or not is not the same as whether they are practically useful or meaningful.
[10] Starting from 2011, these questions only uses sub-samples of the tracking surveys concerned, the sample size for each question also varies.

Results of survey conducted in mid-December revealed that 17% of the respondents were satisfied with the overall performance of the Legco members, and 49% were dissatisfied. As for the performance of the HKPF, 62% were satisfied while 13% were dissatisfied. Besides, 50% were satisfied with the performance of the PLA stationed in Hong Kong, whereas only 3% were dissatisfied. The mean score of the Legco members is 2.5, meaning in between "half-half" and "quite dissatisfied", while the respective mean scores of the two disciplinary forces are 3.5 and 3.9, meaning close to "quite satisfied" in general.

In the survey, we also asked respondents for their age. If they were reluctant to give their exact age, they could give us a range. According to their answers, we grouped them into post 80s and non-post 80s. Herewith further analysis of the overall performance of the People's Liberation Army Hong Kong Garrison by respondents' age:

In January 2007, POP opened a feature page called "Opinion Daily" at the "POP Site", to record significant events and selected polling figures on a day-to-day basis, in order to let readers judge by themselves the reasons for the ups and downs of different opinion figures. In July 2007, POP collaborated with Wisers Information Limited whereby Wisers supplies to POP each day starting from July 24, a record of significant events of that day, according to the research method designed by POP. These daily entries would be uploaded to "Opinion Daily" as soon as they are verified by POP.

For the polling items covered in this press release, the previous survey was conducted from September 13 to 20, 2011 while this survey was conducted from December 14 to 28, 2011. In between these two surveys, herewith the significant events selected from counting newspaper headlines and commentaries on a daily basis and covered by at least 25% of the local newspaper articles. Readers can make their own judgment if these significant events have any impacts to different polling figures.

Robert Ting-Yiu Chung, Director of Public Opinion Programme, observed, "Our survey shows that compared to three months ago, people's satisfaction with the overall performance of Legco members has significantly increased by 5 percentage points, back to the level registered at the end of 2010. Net satisfaction now stands at negative 32 percentage points, which has significantly improved by 10 percentage points compared to three months ago, probably because of the concerted effort of most Legco members in some livelihood and political issues, like opposing the increase in tariff by the two electricity companies, and expressing concerns on vote-rigging. (Note: The net popularity of the SAR Government for the same period is negative 25 percentage points, as published before.) As for the two disciplinary forces, the satisfaction rates of both Hong Kong Police Force and PLA Hong Kong Garrison have increased by 5 and 3 percentage points respectively. Their net popularity now stands at positive 49 and positive 47 percentage points respectively, while people's dissatisfaction with the PLA Hong Kong Garrison continues to remain near zero. Further analysis shows that 「non -post 80s" respondents tend to be more satisfied with PLA Hong Kong Garrison than those "post 80s" respondents. It should be noted, however, that people's satisfaction with Legco members in general includes those returned by geographical as well as functional constituencies. As for the reasons affecting the ups and downs of various figures, we leave it to our readers to form their own judgment using detailed records displayed in our "Opinion Daily".」

• January 26, 2012 (Thursday) 1pm to 2 pm: Ratings of top 5 Executive Councillors