The sec­ond stage of the PSEHK study involved devel­op­ing and admin­is­ter­ing a ques­tion­naire. The sur­vey instru­ment adapted the UK Poverty and Social Exclu­sion Sur­vey 2012 (see PSEUK 2012) for the Hong Kong con­text to exam­ine the extent and nature of poverty and social exclusion.

The con­tent of the Ques­tion­naire com­prised five parts (Show­cards):

  1. Socioe­co­nomic and demo­graphic ques­tions – to col­lect infor­ma­tion about the pro­file of respondents
  2. Neces­si­ties – to mea­sure what items and activ­i­ties peo­ple don’t have and whether this is because of choice or lack of affordability
  3. Per­cep­tions of stan­dard of liv­ing – to ascer­tain the respondent’s views on the level of income which is needed to keep peo­ple above the poverty line
  4. Social exclu­sion – to mea­sure aspects of social exclu­sion includ­ing liv­ing envi­ron­ment, local ser­vices, time use, crit­i­cal life events, social net­works and sup­port, finance sit­u­a­tion and debts, phys­i­cal and men­tal health, and social and polit­i­cal engagement
  5. Para­data — this sec­tion is com­pleted at the end of the inter­view but the enu­mer­a­tor as a means of assess­ing sur­vey and data quality.

In the Neces­si­ties sec­tion, Shuf­fle Card Sets (Cards: blue, green, pink, orange) for both the adult and children’s items/​activities [Chi­nese Ver­sion only] are given to respon­dents. On each card there is one item or one activ­ity for an adult or a child. Respon­dents are asked to con­sider whether they or their chil­dren ‘have’ or ‘don’t have’ and whether they ‘don’t want’ or ‘don’t have and can’t afford’. The cards are shuf­fled each time by the enu­mer­a­tor in order to avoid response bias.

For exam­ple, in rela­tion to the neces­si­ties for adults, the enu­mer­a­tor asks:

I’d like to hand you some cards with dif­fer­ent items that relate to our stan­dard of liv­ing, please tell me which item you have, don’t have but don’t want or don’t have and can’t afford.

The enu­mer­a­tor then records the item num­ber that is given by the respon­dent in the appro­pri­ate box.

The same pro­ce­dure also applies to the children’s items and activities.