The PSEHK was under­taken in two stages. Stage One involved qual­i­ta­tive research in the form of focus groups. Stage Two involved a ques­tion­naire.

The aims of using focus group (FG) method­ol­ogy are:

1. To gen­er­ate a list of the neces­si­ties of life in con­tem­po­rary Hong Kong and to explore whether con­sen­sus could be reached on this list among participants
2. To explore pub­lic per­cep­tions of poverty and social exclusion

A pur­po­sive sam­pling method was adopted in order to col­lect var­i­ous views of peo­ple from dif­fer­ent socio-​economic sta­tus. Five tar­get groups include:

1. Lone par­ents
2. Cou­ples with children
3. Cou­ples with­out children
4. Sin­gle Adults
5. Elderly

The selec­tion of the par­tic­i­pants from each FG was based on the Sam­ple Selec­tion Cri­te­ria, includ­ing fam­ily income sta­tus and other socioe­co­nomic char­ac­ter­is­tics such as new arrival sta­tus, employ­ment sta­tus, gen­der, age, hous­ing tenure and house­hold type.

Two pilot FGs were con­ducted with the under­grad­u­ate stu­dents from the Hong Kong Insti­tute of Edu­ca­tion for assess­ing the suit­abil­ity of the topic guide and addi­tional mate­ri­als. Revi­sions were made for the for­mal FGs accordingly.

The FG mate­ri­als include:

• Topic Guide
• About Your View — Two-​page lay­out ask­ing about par­tic­i­pants views on poverty and social exclu­sion before the focus group interview
• Show­cards — List of Neces­si­ties of Life, Social Spheres of Social Exclu­sion and Poverty Def­i­n­i­tions are used to facil­i­tate the discussion
• The Vignettes which are mainly drawn from the TV Series from Radio Tele­vi­sion Hong Kong – Rich Mate Poor Mate II (2011), are applied to clar­ify par­tic­i­pants’ judg­ments and to aid the explo­ration of sen­si­tive top­ics related to dis­ad­van­taged and social exclusion

A total of 7 groups with 49 par­tic­i­pants were recruited for for­mal FGs (see table below). Each for­mal FG lasted between 1 to 1.5 hours and was facil­i­tated by a mod­er­a­tor and two note tak­ers. Inter­views were audio-​recorded with par­tic­i­pants’ informed con­sent. Full tran­scrip­tions were under­taken and Frame­work Analy­sis was used to analyse the data and recog­nis­e emerg­ing pat­terns and themes.