HKUPOP: Public Sentiment Index continues to dropBack

“South Korean Presidential Election 2012 Guessing Game” launched

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 “South Korean Presidential Election 2012 Guessing Game” in late November. Users can now make guesses on the vote share of the South Korean Presidential Election due to take place on December 19 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 December 18). Over 730 guesses have been received so far and the accumulated Popcoins reaches 71,105. The latest situation is Park Geun-hye and Moon Jae-in leading the other 5 candidates by a large margin, with 42% and 38% of vote share respectively. Besides, POP is recruiting a team of “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.

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 December 9, 2012, while that of the next round of release will be December 30, 2012. The tentative release date for the next release will be January 3, 2013 (Thursday).

The PSI released by POP today shows that as of December 9, the latest Public Sentiment Index (PSI) is 83.9, dropping 7.0 from late-November. As for the Government Appraisal (GA) and Society Appraisal (SA), the scores are 88.3 and 89.3, down 5.4 and 5.0 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 continues to drop over the last two weeks, so do the GA and SA scores. The latest PSI now drops to the level registered between late-October and early-November 2012. Figures show that the illegal structure incident of CE CY Leung has almost offset the positive effect brought by the government’s new housing policies in November. 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’ .”

• January 3, 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) (1992-2012)

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

• Online table: PSI (per release) (7/2012 – 12/2012)

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