Survey on Public’s Drinking Habit and Awareness of the Health Consequence Associated with AlcoholBack

This was a random telephone survey conducted by real interviewers under close supervision. All data were collected by our interviewers using a Computer Assisted Telephone Interview (CATI) system which allowed real-time data capture and consolidation. To ensure data quality, on top of on-site supervision, voice recording, screen capturing and camera surveillance were used to monitor the interviewers’ performance.

To minimize sampling bias, telephone numbers were first drawn randomly from the residential telephone directories as “seed numbers” from which another set of numbers was generated using the “plus/minus one/two” method, in order to capture the unlisted numbers. Duplicated numbers were then filtered, and the remaining numbers were mixed in random order to produce the final telephone sample.

Target respondents of the study were Cantonese-speaking population of Hong Kong of age 18 or above. When telephone contact was successfully established with a target household, only one qualified person from the household was selected using the “next birthday rule”. The official fieldwork was conducted during the period of January 19 to 26, 2011. A total of 516 qualified local citizens were successfully interviewed. The overall response rate was 74.6% (Table 2), and the sampling error for percentages was less than 2.2%. In other words, the sampling error for all percentages was less than plus/minus 4.5 at 95% confidence level.

To ensure representativeness of the findings, the raw data collected 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 2010. All figures in this report are based on the weighted sample.