iv
Hong Kong's industry, a number of establishments were found to be
untraceable (18). A further number (58) proved to be unsuitable
by having for example no paid employees or full-time workers;
these were all firms in the smallest size category, usually with
a total labour force of under 5 persons. Forty-eight firms
declined to cooperate and of these 38 were again in the smallest
size category and represented only a small number of potential
respondents. All of these establishment units were replaced: the
justification for replacement in the last case being the need to
include within the survey the very small firms which are such a
feature of the Hong Kong economy, the difficulty which such small-
scale employers had in releasing workers for interview when they
were in fact willing to cooperate and finally, the fact that the
employer's refusal did not necessarily mean that the workers
themselves would have refused to cooperate. As far as can be seen,
the 48 firms unable to cooperate did not seem in any way different
from others in their size categories.)
on.
The interviewer was given for each establishment unit, a list
of the names of the randomly selected respondents. He was also
provided with a list of randomly selected replacement workers and
instructed that if a worker had left the organization, had not
turned up for work that day or was untraceable for some reason,
the first of the reserve workers should be substituted, and so
This procedure was made necessary by the very high turnover
of so many firms in Hong Kong, and the rapid expansion and contrac-
tion of some firms, particularly the smaller ones. However, the
interviewer was clearly instructed not to replace any worker who
(6) declined to be interviewed. The workers in general were willing
to cooperate with the survey and the response rate calculated by
comparing the number of refusals to the number of workers actually
asked for an interview was 97%, which is very high in survey
experience.
The selection
The number of interviews obtained was in total over 900 (917
to be exact) from workers employed, as we have seen,
in well over
100 different firms in diverse sectors of industry.
of the sample was found, despite the problems of out-of-date,
incomplete and unobtainable records and the rapid turnover not only
of the workers but also of the smaller firms themselves, to be
A