【Legal Consciousness Survey】

Research Design

• Population and Areas of Survey 
  In this project, respondents who are 18 years old and above and have a telephone at home were interviewed as the survey population. The areas of survey include cities and counties in Taiwan, excluding outlying islands as well as Lianjiang County and Kinmen County of Fujian Province.
  
• Methodology
  This survey was carried out by means of telephone interview. The interviewers collected data from the respondents with the aid of the Computer-Assisted Telephone Interviewing system (hereafter referred to as “CATI”).
  
• Sampling Method
  This project used the “2004-2005 Chunghwa Telecom Residential Telephone Database” (purchased by the Center for Survey Research, RCHSS, Academia Sinica) as the sampling population to conduct stratified systematic sampling. The target number of interviews was 1,500. In the first stage, the 23 cities/counties in Taiwan were divided into 23 strata. Based on the demographic data (as of the end of June, 2009) provided by the Department of Household Registration of the Ministry of the Interior of the Executive Yuan, the proportional number of subsamples was calculated for each of the 23 cities/counties. Then, based on the national telephone database, phone numbers of residential use were extracted as required for each city/county under the principle of systematic sampling. To mitigate the problem that users of some phone numbers could not be included due to the coverage of the national telephone database, the randomization principle was then used to select the last two digits of the phone numbers to be dialed. In the second stage, the intra-household sampling method (Hung, 2001) was adopted to select the respondents who should be interviewed by matching the qualified number of people in the household with the number of qualified males and the last two digits of the phone number. In this way, each qualified respondent candidate had a non-zero chance of being selected. For those in households with the same population structure, every qualified candidate had the same chance of being selected.
  

Survey Process

• Pilot Survey
  The pilot survey took place on March 1, 2010. The procedure was as follows: After the interviewers reported for duty, they first received a briefing regarding the survey questions and interview principles. Then, the interviewers were asked to conduct surveys via phone for about one hour. The surveys continued until 9 o’clock. Then, the interviewers were gathered to discuss their questions and issues regarding the interviews. The discussion results were used as a reference for revising the survey questions. The implementation results of the pilot survey were as follows: 1,144 calls, 217 refusals, and 67 completed interviews. The average time of a completed interview was 17 minutes and 45 seconds.
• Official Survey
  The Official interview surveys started on March 11, 2010. A 15-workday schedule was proposed, and the survey was to end on March 31, 2010. However, as the survey process went smoothly, the number of required respondents was reached on March 26, 2010 (three working days earlier than planned). In terms of the number of samples, the number of phone numbers registered in each sample set was 1,500, with another set added after the use of the current set. A total of seven sets of samples were added during project execution, so a total of eight sets of samples were used. The cumulative number of calls was 12,000. The final execution results are as follows: the number of calls was 27,605; the number of completed interviews was 1,542; the number of refusals was 2,239. The average time of a completed interview was 17 minutes and 9 seconds.

Survey Result

1,500 interviews were expected to be completed for the project. In the end, a total of 1,542 interviews were successfully conducted. Under the 95% confidence interval, the sampling error was approximately ±2.50%. The Response Rate 1 (RR1), or the minimum response rate, was 14.93%. The Refusal Rate 1 (REF1) was 21.68%.

𝐓𝐎【2010 臺灣法律與社會變遷調查第2期】