Page 95 - Feasibility Study of New Media Technology on Constructing Online Public Sphere

Chapter 4. Methodology

Thus, among all surveys, the numbers of valid copies are 105 (the Sun Zhigang case),

105 (Xiamen PX plant event) and 110 (Yihuang incident).

4.3.2 Content of the questionnaire

Prior to the survey questions, a summary of the case was presented in the begin-
ning of the survey, and then there were two parts to each questionnaire. The first con-
sisted of control variables to investigate the background information about respondents
and their experience of using social networking services: for example, the respond-

ent’s gender, age, occupation, income level, education background, online active time,
location information and which social networking sites that they were using or has
registered for. It also included respondents’ attitudes towards online topics and public
events, their motivations and ways of getting involved in public participation, and their

views on the government’s information control.
It is necessary to clarify that the purpose in designing the first part of the ques-
tionnaire is due to the uncertainty of the respondents to the survey. As explained in the
following section (4.4), different from the semi-structured interviews in my book, the

number and identity of participants is explicit, and they are only limited to media prac-
titioners. Hence, the demographic features of the survey respondents were considered
necessary when designing the questionnaire. In addition, the initial plan was to exam-
ine if there exists a relationship between people’s background information (e.g., gender,

age, occupation, educational level, income level) and their preference and perception
on public participation. However, the survey results did not demonstrate a significant
relationship between these two aspects. The background information of the survey re-
spondents drawn from the first part of each questionnaire is summarised below (Table

3) for readers’ reference. As can be seen in Table 3, the respondents to each survey cov-
ered a wide range of population group. Hence, the survey result is representative and
can be generalised to a wider extent.

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