Pollsters in Hong Kong must deal with credibility gap

Every evening at 6.30pm they file in, filling the industrial-green cubicles and air with chatter as they pick up the phones and dial.

Over the next four hours, each of the 80 or so people packed into two small rooms will go through about 300 phone numbers. Some won't work, others don't pick up, and yet others will hang up. They have just seconds to convince people of Hong Kong to give up 10 to 15 minutes of their time.

These are the pollsters for the University of Hong Kong who, for HK$30-$50 an hour, will be yelled at, hung up on and given all the other treatment that unsolicited callers get, all to get a sense of what you are thinking.

"We ask about their television habits, whether they're happy with the government, rate Legco members, about H7N9," says Angela Lam Oi-lan, a housewife who works at HKU's public opinion programme three to four night a week. "I consider this an investment in seeing how confident people are in Hong Kong's future."

Lam doesn't watch the news much, so this is a way not just to make pocket money but also to get a sense of what's going on in Hong Kong. This is also why governments, interests groups, political parties and institutions commission such polls.

But while polls the world over are considered fairly accurate ways to judge public sentiment, with the increased polarisation of Hong Kong politics, more are asking the question: are they really a reflection of what's going on around us?

It's a question that is growing in importance as Hong Kong moves towards universal suffrage in the 2017 election for chief executive. Various parties and individuals tout their solutions for the shape of the city's political structure … often citing polls in support of their ideas.