HKU POP: Public Sentiment ReboundsBack

PopCon users accurately predict Barack Obama re-elected as US President

The final guesstimates for the “US Presidential Election 2012 Guessing Game” put Barack Obama in the lead over Mitt Romney with 290 versus 248 electoral votes. This guessing game was launched by the “PopCon” e-platform hosted by the Public Opinion Programme (POP) at the University of Hong Kong. Over 300 guesstimate submissions have been received, and the accumulated bonus Popcoins now stands at 39,615. The winners will be announced in due course. Besides, POP is recruiting a team called “Friends of POP” to demonstrate civil power. “Friends of POP” will be invited to participate in supporting various research activities organized by POP, including civil referendums (PopVote 3.23 mobilized about 300 citizens), election exit polls (LC election studies mobilized about 250), rally head-counting (July 1st rally mobilized about 50), as well as facilitating online research. The first round of recruitment will end on December 31, 2012. Interested citizens are welcome to register at “PopCon” e-platform (http://popcon.hk).

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 November 11, 2012, while that of the next round of release will be November 25. The tentative release date for the next release will be November 29, Thursday.

The PSI released by POP today shows that as of November 11, the latest Public Sentiment Index (PSI) is 93.5, soaring 13.8 from late-October. As for the Government Appraisal (GA) and Society Appraisal (SA), the scores are 95.7 and 96.1, up 10.7 and 9.7 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:

Edward Chit-Fai Tai, Senior Data Analyst of Public Opinion Programme, observed, “Hong Kong’s public sentiment has significantly rebounded over the last two weeks, both in terms of GA and SA scores, may be due to the government’s new housing policies. The latest monthly PSI now recovers to that of January 2011. However, whether PSI will continue to climb or not is yet to be seen. 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 29, 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 (per month) (1992-2012)

• Online table: PSI (per month) (1992-2012)

• Online table: PSI (per release) (7/2012 – 11/2012)

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