HKUPOP: Public Sentiment DeterioratedBack

The latest guesses for Barack Obama and Mitt Romney now stand at 296 electoral votes to 242 electoral votes for the “US Presidential Election 2012 Guessing Game”. The “PopCon” e-platform (http://popcon.hk) hosted by the Public Opinion Programme (POP) at the University of Hong Kong launched a new game called “US Presidential Election 2012 Guessing Game” last week. There have been over 200 guesses now and the accumulated Popcoins are 24,735. Users can now make guesses on the result of the US Presidential Election due to take place on November 6 this year, in order to earn credits and win prizes. Guessing figures will be released real time until the last minute of the game (i.e. 23:59 on November 5) for citizens to analyze the trend on their own. The winners will be decided by comparing the guesses to the election results. The above figures are as of November 1, 12 pm.

The Public Sentiment Index (PSI) compiled by the Public Opinion Programme (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 October 28, 2012, while that of the next round of release will be November 11. The tentative release date for the next release will be November 15, Thursday.

The PSI released by POP today shows that as of October 28, the latest Public Sentiment Index (PSI) is 79.7, down 6.0 from mid-October. As for the Government Appraisal (GA) and Society Appraisal (SA), the scores are 85.1 and 86.4, down 4.6 and 4.2 respectively. Below shows the monthly average chart on PSI, GA and SA:

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

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

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

Frank Wai-Kin Lee, Research Manager of Public Opinion Programme, observed, “The public’s overall sentiment in the last two weeks has worsened. Both GA and SA have dropped significantly. However, the average PSI of October is significantly higher than that of September. Looking back, the latest monthly PSI now stands roughly at the same level as registered in November 2002 and March 2012. 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 our ‘Opinion Daily’ .”

• November 15, 2012 (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 (1992-2012)

• Online table: PSI (1992-2012)

* The figure in our original release was a typographical mistake and is corrected on January 11, 2013.