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Note: This article represents the view of the author and not the University of Hong Kong.

Public opinion surveys are closely linked with the democratic development. This is true no matter in the Chinese or Western society. Since direct elections were introduced into the Legislative Council in 1991, public opinion surveys have started to flourish. However, the democratic development in Hong Kong is still in an early stage, as seen from the still narrow scope in direct elections, immature party politics and varying standard among media bodies. Therefore, it is apparent that the way which the media reports the public opinion polls cannot match with the international standard.

While the Legislative Council election is drawing near, different types of public opinion polls, including snap polls, tracking polls, rolling polls, exit polls and other polls will emerge. These still have not included the internal surveys conducted by different camps. In fact, the result of some internal surveys will also leak out to the media, either intentionally or unintentionally.

Here the author would like to introduce several types of popular public opinion surveys in elections, and to urge the media bodies to develop a set of professional code of ethics to regulate themselves when reporting the public opinion surveys, so as to match with the international standard.

Snap polls

Snap polls are generally referred to those short and precise polls with ad-hoc issues. Snap polls aim at revealing the public or voters' instant responses towards several issues, without monitoring the change of public opinions in the long run. Of course, snap polls also need to meet the criteria of scientific surveys, including random sampling, adequate sample size, appropriate phrasing of questions, etc. If there is a need for the questions in snap polls to be repeated continuously, snap polls will then be transformed to tracking polls. However, in western societies, online snap polls have started to become popular. Since there is generally no stringent sampling process in online snap polls, the concept of "snap polls" have started to merge with "instant polls" to become a vague concept.

Tracking polls

The difference between tracking polls and snap polls is that, the former aims at examining the upward and downward trend of the public opinion in a long term. Tracking polls are used in many surveys on popularity ratings of leaders and candidates' strength during elections, and they are the selling point of the professional media bodies as well. Tracking polls definitely need to meet the requirements of scientific surveys. Yet, since the phrasing of questions is the same each time, while the variables in the phrasing of questions can be controlled, the relative changes in the figures will become the emphasis in the analysis. It must be stated that, the tracking polls commonly reported by the media are different from the longitudinal tracking panel studies in social research. For the latter, the selected cases will be interviewed repeatedly in order to analyze the changes in each of them. This may take several ten years to interview the same batch of respondents repeatedly.

Rolling polls

Rolling polls are also another kind of commonly used election survey by the media in a democratic society. The Public Opinion Programme has started to conduct rolling polls since the 1995 Legislative Council Election. Yet, at that time, the survey result was only used by the sponsoring bodies. This year, the Civic Exchange sponsored our whole survey, and thus the result could be fully publicized. To put it simple, rolling polls are similar to tracking polls, but only more frequently conducted. Usually a certain number of interviews will be completed every day, and the data collected in a few days will be collapsed, then added and dropped on a "plus one, minus one day" basis, and analyzed on a daily basis.

Take the rolling surveys conducted by the author this year as an example, we expect that 334 interviews with the registered voters will be completed every day in the early stage, which means more than 1000 successful cases will be accumulated in 3 days, to form a complete survey. However, since the sub-sample size is relatively smaller in individual constituencies, these figures will be accumulated and only roll once every 5 days. Around 150-250 registered voters will be included each time, depending on the size of the constituencies. While the election is approaching, the rolling sample size will gradually increase in order to minimize errors.

The strength of the rolling polls is that they can master the change of the candidates' strength in a timely manner. Their weakness is that while the rolling process takes time, the sensitivity is lower than the snap polls when there are sudden changes.

Exit polls

Hong Kong people should be very familiar with exit polls and thus details are omitted here. In Taiwan, the term "zhu kou min tiao" was used by the media, and was only fully introduced in this year's presidential election, yet not too successful. In Hong Kong and other places where exit polls are more successfully conducted, exit polls are generally coordinated by one research body, while expenses are shared by individual media bodies. The reason is very simple. Exit polls need huge human and technical resources and thus are high risk survey work. It is not economical to be borne by one single media body. Besides, the highest value of exit polls does not lie in the instant estimation of the result after the election, as otherwise the survey data will totally lose its value after the release of the result. On the other hand, the main value of exit polls is that the data can be used to read and explain the voters' voting behaviour, so as to analyze the candidates' strength in different perspectives. As a result, many academics in the world are interested in taking part in exit polls and analyzing the relevant data.

The reports of all exit polls conducted by the author have been released. Starting from last year, the exit polls' figures in each district have also been released in our website, which can help in the analysis of electoral culture to a certain extent.

Apart from the polls introduced above, there are also other types of polls, some have long history, some are still developing, whereas some are mere heresies. They include benchmark polls, deliberative polls, neuro polls, online survey, propaganda "polls", mobilization "polls", and push polls recently emerged. Due to the limited space, not all can be described here.

Professional Code of Ethics

Since the standards among various local media bodies vary and there is no uniform professional code of conduct, therefore, how to handle the public opinion surveys during the election period will be an issue which calls for attention followed by the election cycle. In order to be effective, the author would like to suggest a method below.

First, the author believes that, it is not easy to establish a set of comprehensive professional code of ethics in a short period of time. On the other hand, the author has never agreed that the government should enact laws to regulate the report of public opinion surveys, since this involves the question of freedom of speech. Therefore, alternatively, the author would like to suggest that all media bodies should be self-disciplined, and should self-execute, or even openly proclaim to execute a set of professional code of conduct which meet the international standard.

It is in fact not difficult to reach the international standard. The author has made reference to the concerned standard and criteria adopted by some international bodies, including the World Association for Public Opinion Research, American Association for Public Opinion Research and the World Association of Research Professionals, (formerly known as ESOMAR), and discovered that regarding the part related to the media, it mainly demands the media to abide by a set of "Minimal Disclosure Principles" on the report of public opinion polls. If the local media really wants to raise their reporting standard, this can definitely be achieved.

To be more concrete, in the author's view, we can draft a set of "Professional Guidelines for Hong Kong Media when Reporting Public Opinion Polls". This guideline can either be jointly initiated by the media itself, or openly endorsed as the internal guidelines for the media bodies. The author boldly drafts the "Public Opinion Survey Guidelines (2004)" as follows:

Joint Guidelines

1. "Professional Guidelines for Hong Kong Media when Reporting Public Opinion Polls", hereinafter referred to as "Public Opinion Survey Guidelines (2004)", or "the Guideline", is of voluntary basis which aims at demonstrating to the media the standard it should abide by when reporting public opinion surveys.

2. For those printed media which voluntarily abide by this guideline, the following information should be provided when reporting the public opinion surveys:

2.1 Name of sponsoring body (if applicable);
2.2 Name of research agency;
2.3 Target population;
2.4 Date of survey;
2.5 Sampling method, and if random sampling is adopted, response rate;
2.6 Sample size, and all weighting methods;
2.7 Extent of accuracy of the survey result;
2.8 Phrasing of questions in relevant parts of the questionnaire.

3. For those electronic media which voluntarily abide by this guideline, the following information should be provided when reporting the public opinion surveys:

3.1 Name of sponsoring body (if applicable);
3.2 Name of research agency;
3.3 Target population;
3.4 Date of survey;
3.5 Sample size.

Of course, research agencies responsible for conducting surveys (including the media itself sometimes) should also enact their own regulations at the same time. More information should be released when publicizing the survey result for users' reference.

In the author's view, if the local professional media practitioners, such as the Newspaper Society, the Hong Kong News Executives' Association, the Hong Kong Federation of Journalists, the Hong Kong Journalists Association, the Press Council and even individual media and survey bodies can recommend the above guidelines together, and gradually improve the content, so as to form a set of binding regulation within the profession, then the media in Hong Kong can definitely take a leading role and guide the whole Chinese media to move forward.