Contact informationBack


  Date of survey : 18/1-26/2/2010
  Survey method : Telephone survey conducted by telephone interviewers
  Target population : All local SMEs, defined as local companies with annual sales turnover up to HK$100 million, and MMEs, defined as local companies with annual sales turnover over HK$100 million, covering many different sectors in Hong Kong except those in the service industry such as financing, insurance, legal, public relation, advertising, etc.
  Sampling method : The contacts were randomly drawn from the D&B HK Database, supplemented by the SME Directory maintained by the Hong Kong Trade Development Council. Duplicated numbers were filtered, and the remaining numbers were mixed in random order to produce the final sampling frame.
  Sample size : 1,005 successful cases (303 respondents were from MMEs and 702 were from SMEs)
  Effective Response rate : 62.2%
  Std. sampling error : Less than 1.6 percentage points. In other words, the sampling error for all percentages based on the full sample was less than plus/minus 3.2 percentage points at 95% confidence level, while the sampling error for the MME and SME sub-samples was less than plus/minus 5.7 and 3.8 percentage points respectively.

Table 1 Calculation of effective response rate

   Effective Response rate
= [ Successful cases / (Successful cases + Partial interview + Refusal cases by eligible respondents + Refusal cases by prorated-eligible respondents) ]
= [ 1,005 / ( 1,005 + 7+ 3 + 381 + 472[(1005 + 7 + 3 + 381) / (1,005 + 7+ 3+ 381 + 1,612)]* ) ]
= 62.2%
* Figure obtained by pro-rata

Table 2 Breakdown of contact information of the survey

 

Frequency

Percentage

Respondents』 ineligibility confirmed

4,247

27.0%

Fax/ data line

331

2.1%

Invalid number

2,080

13.2%

Call-forwarding/ mobile/ pager number

187

1.2%

Special technological difficulties

37

0.2%

No eligible respondents

1,612

10.3%

 

 

 

Respondents』 eligibility not confirmed

6,098

38.8%

Line busy

200

1.3%

No answer

4,487

28.6%

Answering device

446

2.8%

Call-blocking

15

0.1%

Language problem

301

1.9%

Interview terminated before the screening question

472

3.0%

Others

177

1.1%

 

 

 

Respondents』 eligibility confirmed, but failed to complete the interview

4,359

27.7%

Known respondent refusal

381

2.4%

Appointment date beyond the end of the fieldwork period

3,467

22.1%

Partial interview

10

0.1%

Miscellaneous

501

3.2%

 

 

 

Successful cases

1,005

6.4%

 

 

 

Total

15,709

100.0%