Final report of the project "Public Support for Social Inclusion Policies"

Social inclusion indicators inform policy advocacy and intervention. Efforts to enhance social inclusion could backfire if they provoke opinion backlash or intergroup hostilities. Yet, to date there is no comprehensive and regular measurement of public support for different types of social inclusion policies in Hong Kong. Consequently, we cannot determine how they are received by the public. Equally important, existing studies generally do not collect data on respondents’ beliefs about social progress and group identities, despite their critical role in attitude formation. This information is particularly crucial as the city struggles through social movements and the COVID-19 pandemic, which are likely to harden the boundaries between social groups.

This project accomplished three objectives to address the existing knowledge gaps. Firstly, it developed a user-friendly survey tool, the Support for Social Inclusion Score (SFSIS), which measures public opinion on social policies that extend rights to five major marginalized groups in Hong Kong: the elderly, new immigrants, ethnic minorities, LGBTQ individuals, and disabled people. The instrument includes 25 rigorously selected policy items that capture the multidimensional aspects of social inclusion attitudes. Using data from a representative telephone survey in Hong Kong (N=1,010) and a parallel online survey (N=1,000), we demonstrated the instrument's outstanding psychometric properties and its potential for use in various research settings. Although designed in the context of Hong Kong, the survey items can be broken down and adapted to suit diverse societies. For the first time, policymakers will be able to identify key areas of policy disagreement in a transparent and systematic manner.

Secondly, to understand public support for social inclusion policies, this project gathered data on the psychological and demographic attributes of respondents that are likely to influence group-based discrimination. Specifically, we investigated whether self-interest or psychological perceptions of deservingness affected an individual’s support for social inclusion policies. Self-interest explanations rely on people’s socio-economic characteristics to predict attitudes. For instance, individuals competing with marginalized groups for resources might oppose social inclusion policies, while those with higher incomes and greater economic security might support such policies. Conversely, psychological explanations emphasize factors like belief in meritocracy, perceived needs and social progress, identity complexity, and social dominance orientation. These psychological variables influence attitudes irrespective of one’s socio-structural position. Our findings revealed that psychological factors, such as social awareness, domination beliefs, and meritocracy,
significantly contributed to shaping policy support. Policymakers can then allocate resources to develop relevant public education campaigns and policy frameworks.

Thirdly, to lay foundation for repeated surveys of social inclusion, and to evaluate the potential of online surveys in Hong Kong, this project fielded the SFSIS to an online sample in parallel with a traditional telephone sample. The high costs of conducting telephone surveys have prompted many survey researchers to consider online non-probability surveys. This project reported significant differences between the non-probability and probability surveys and evaluated one of the latest techniques in survey methodology, which is to supplement inferences based on small probability samples with prior distributions derived from nonprobability data (Wiśniowski et al. 2020). Our results demonstrate the efficacy of the method, suggesting that blending non-probability online and probability telephone samples can help reduce survey costs while achieving model-based estimates comparable to traditional probability telephone surveys.