Course talk:POLI380SEPT2010Cutler/Survey/HST
I think question 3 is a waste of valuable question space. 99% of people were affected by PST exemption last year. It is not something useful enough to bother with.
3.Would you or your family members have been eligible for a PST exemption this year if HST were not in place? (1) Yes (2) No (9) Unknown/Prefer not to answer
I'd be much more interested to see if there is a discord between support for the HST and if people believe HST is good tax policy. With that in mind I've added a seventh question.
I also think we're missing a significant area of the debate about the perceived deceit in the passing of the law in the first place. In my opinion, the areas to focus on are: 1. (do you think this)is this good for you? 2. is this good for the province? 3. does the way this tax was enacted preclude your support for it? 4. do you think that the HST privileges businesses over individuals
Danny Urquhart
As pointed out by the contributor before me, The hot-button issue about the HST has to do with the political forces for and against it – the provincial government on the one side and the HST protesters lead by Bill Vander Zalm on the other. The possible political fallout is BC residents will react to the call to recall Liberal MLAs, which could eventually lead to unseating the Liberal government.
I would be curious to know if the Anti-HST camp can garner enough support for the recall. So I would say we go back to the basics of framing the research question and the hypothesis focusing on asking survey respondents how they will respond to the recall campaign.
This is my suggestions:
Research question – Would the anti-HST campaign have majority support in at least one constituency to recall Liberal MLAs?
Hypothesis – The majority of BC residents have strong feelings against the HST that a recall campaign would result in unseating a number of liberal MLAs.
The variables to measure would be MLAs recalled (constituencies) And BC residents responding to the recall (% of recall response of total responds)
Survey Questions –-- 1. Are you for or against the HST? 1. for 0. against
2. How would you rate your feeling about the HST? 1- very favourable 2. somewhat favourable 3. indifferent 4. less favourable 5. strongly unfavourable 3.
Then I would ask the other three questions to get to the key points whether they will participate in the recall and if they are active in voting to be a reliable respondent to the recall. I have added five questions to the list.
Thank you, Laeke
I, actually, am not sure that a focus on the recall is all that productive either. The recall is not a province-wide initiative. It is focused in very specific swing ridings, which we will not be targeting for our survey. There isn't much interest in whether a collection of people, in many different ridings, would support a recall. Levels of support are just too disparate across ridings. I thinks its interesting enough for 1 or 2 questions, but not 5.
It seems we have a plethora of questions ready, so I think our primary objective for now is agreeing on an approach. More people's input would be handy/knudge-knudge, wink-wink.
On Q9: People might have a difficult time with answering this question because some people are favourable towards the tax, but are disfavourable towards the enactment of it. You might have to distinguish between the HST qua policy and the HST qua enacted policy. It's not quite so easy a binary.
On Q10: same ambiguity as in Q9.
I think Q11 is promising.
On Q12: There are too many potential answers to the question "why" for us to put into a program, and it inevitably leads to us interpreting their answers to fit in the categories we make. ie. we'd consider "politics doesn't interest me" and "I don't have time to bother with the HST" to be in the same category despite them meaning slightly different things. We reduce accuracy and increase the likelihood of bias when we have to interpret answers to fit into easier to manage categories after the respondent responds.
On Q13: It is not informative enough. If I saw that question and was an HST supporter I would vote in the same way as if I was an HST hater. I would probably even answer in the affirmative if I held a rather neutral position. You'll get a 95% and up affirmative response only because its difficult to imagine many scenarios where one might answer no.
I know I'm a nit-picky bastard, Danny Urquhart
I'm just wondering,, don't we need a abstract theory first? (ex: TAX INCREASE --> POLITICAL PARTICIPATION) Our questions would be aimless, if we don't even have a theory.
YI FANG ZHAO
I agree with the previous statement, we first need to propose a theory that has abstract concepts and then move to operationalize the concepts so that we can measure them. The theory involves the relationship between the two abstract concepts, taxation and political participation. The hypothesis would be that the “The overall feeling of discontent towards the HST will increase the number of people that participate in the referendum,” because the HST is a variable that we can use to measure to determine the effects a tax has on participation. Now we should go through all of the questions that people have proposed and decide which five are the best to measure our variable. We need to choose questions that ask about the effect the HST has on people ( i.e. attitude, perceived benefits/consequences).
I think question #10 is good because we can measure people’s attitude toward the HST and therefore it can help us determine whether or not they are more likely to participate. For example, if people rated their feelings towards the HST as “strongly unfavourable” then we can infer that they are more likely to participate in the upcoming referendum because they want to see the HST overturned.
I like the idea of question #8, but maybe we should word it differently? We could simply ask “do you feel that the HST favours businesses over the average working person? (yes/no). It is a good indicator of people’s feelings towards the distribution of the HST’s benefits. If people answer “yes” then we know that they feel that the benefits of the HST favour only a select few and offer more evidence for the anti-HST sentiment.
Amanda Mackaay (Oct 5)
I am wondering whether we should concern ourselves with how much people actually know about the HST. I feel as though there should be at least one or two questions aimed at finding out how much of our readers know about the HST. Just want some thoughts on this question...
Paulina Kisielewska
So our theory will be regarding taxation and its affects on political participation? If we all agree on that it's useful to start looking at which questions will work best to answer our research question.
Some comments I had were that question 4 (questioning the effects of HST on spending) and 17 (questioning what changes it has made in lifestyle) are quite similar and maybe question 4 is a little more detailed and personal to answer. Questions 6, 10, 11 and 16 are good questions. I also agree with Paulina, because I feel that many people are not fully aware of what the HST entails and are only aware of the negative controversy surrounding the topic. So we need to ensure that we control for that. Would it be best to ask a question that is more trivial as in the following question: (because BC HST is lower than other provinces and if there is a significant number of people that do not know the correct answer to this and are yet against the HST, it shows that they are not fully aware of the consequences or benefits of this tax) 18. Are you aware that some other provinces also have their own HST in effect; how is BC's HST in comparison to the rest? (1) BC HST is higher (2) BC HST is lower (3) BC HST is the same (4) Don't know
Question 6 asks how the individual would vote in a referendum but perhaps there should be another question prior to that asking whether or not they would be participating in the referendum at all. 19. There will be a referendum held in September 2011, will you be participating in this referendum? (1) Yes (2) No (3) Don't know
Elnaz Tahanha
With regards to question 3, I was thinking more about the products and services where you would need to declare your exemption rather than it being given to you, (Adult Sized Children's Clothing versus Restaurant Meals), hoping to gauge those who are aware of such exemptions and make use of it, rather than those who just take what they are given, would that have an effect upon how they feel on the HST?
Perhaps we can focus our survey on two parts with what Paulina has suggested as what people know about the HST, and what others have mentioned as how the HST in turn affects political participation.
Cheers, Horace
Our HST topic could relative to some other topics such BC issue, immigration&multiculturalism and public policy.. For example, HST is the independent variable, number of new immigrations to BC (since HST starts) could be the dependent variable. Then, we can try to see whether HST affect immigration's decision to live in this province or not(choose other non-hst/lower tax provinces).
YI FANG ZHAO~
Maybe we should do like this.. theory:taxation and its affects on political participation QESTION 1:are you eligible to vote in BC? 1)YES NO)NO
2:Did you vote in the last provincial election? 1)yes 2) no
A)If yes, and if there will be a HST referendum, will you participate?
1)yes 2)no
B)If NO, and if there will be a HST referndum, will you participate?
1)yes 2)no
3: are you against HST? 1)YES 2)NO
A)If yes, and if there will be a HST referendum, will you participate?
1)yes 2)no
B)If NO, and if there will be a HST referndum, will you participate?
1)yes 2)no
first of all, we exclude those people we can't vote. then, we need to see is there any increasing or decreasing in political participation since the HST introduced. Lastly, we need to see whether those people who against HST will participate more/less, or those who are'nt aainst HST will participate more/less...(ex.we might find out that HST will affect those "against" ppl increase their paticipation, or HST will affect both "agaisnt" and "not against" people increase participation)
YI FANG ZHAO
So are we all agreeing that our theory is: increased taxation leads to increased political participation?
I don't think that question #18 should be included in the survey because it deals with the HST in other provinces; we are concerned with measuring the effects of the HST in British Columbia. Even though it is true that other provinces have the HST, it does not affect B.C. citizens. The way the HST in other provincs is different than the one in B.C, and therefore the tax affects each province differently. Our focus is on how people feel about the HST in BC because it helps us determine wheher or not they will vote in the referendum. In this case maybe our hypothesis should specify that we are concerned with the HST in B.C. so that it is more clear what we are measuring. I think our focus should be on the questions that ask about peoples feelings towards the HST and how likely they are to participate in the referendum( as stated above. These questions are more valid and will help us determine whether or not our independent variable affects our dependent variable.
Amanda Mackaay (Oct 8)
I also agree with Amanda, in that we should probably only focus on the effects of HST within BC. The prof made it clear in lecture that these surveys are to be BC specific, and I think that whether or not HST is in place in other provinces is irrelevant to what we should be focusing on.
In regards to Q16, I am a bit confused as to what exactly it means... as far as I know the HST has been passed already? Unless I am interpreting it wrong. However, I do like how Q13 and Q16 deal with public perception/political repercussions of the HST, so with a bit of tweaking it could be a great final question. Q6 and Q10 also look to be very promising, as well as Q8 if the wording is switched up. With Q20, is there currently a motion in place to reduce the HST by 2%? I know there have been a few rumblings in the news that Campbell MAY reduce the rate by 1%, but there is no confirmation. Actually I think Campbell's office has recently denied that any such plan was in the works. So I think it would be safer if we stayed away from rumours and address the most up to date issues pertaining to the HST: the referendum, the public backlash/discontent and how that will translate for when elections come around.
Louisa Young
The project this weekend is to delete some questions. Don't be shy. we can always reverse the decision. get it down to 10 and then we can vote.
Also, on the theory matter. We're not starting a project from scratch. We're already at the end stage (the survey). We're not interested in helping support our thesis on anything. We're interested in interesting facts about the HST and BC residents. We don't need a single causal theory to fit all of our questions to. We only need to know what we want to find out about. once we know what we want to find out abut then we fit questions to make sure those findings are as accurate as possible.
Deleted 2-4, 11-13, 18, 21: 2.Do you feel that the Government benefits more from the HST than the previous GST/PST system? (1) Yes (2) No (9) Unknown/Prefer not to answer
3.Would you or your family members have been eligible for a PST exemption this year if HST were not in place? (1) Yes (2) No (9) Unknown/Prefer not to answer
4.How has the HST affected your level of spending on a scale of 1-3 if: (1) has Reduced Spending (2) has No Change (3) has Increased Spending (9) Unknown/Prefer not to answer 11. If a recall campaign were undertaken tomorrow to unseat liberal MLAs, would you participate in the recall? 1. Very likely 2. Very unlikely
12. If very unlikely, why not? 1. I still prefer the Liberal government to the NDP 2. It don’t like politics
13. If there was a provincial election tomorrow, would the HST be one of the issues influencing how you cast your vote? 1. Yes 2. No
18. Are you aware that some other provinces also have their own HST in effect; how is BC's HST in comparison to the rest?
(1) BC HST is higher
(2) BC HST is lower
(3) BC HST is the same
(4) Don't know 21> Did you vote in the last provincial election?
1)yes 2) no
If yes, and if there will be a HST referendum, will you participate?
1)yes 2)no
If NO(for the first question), and if there will be a HST referndum, will you participate?
1)yes 2)no
I think in this way, we could see wether HST will increase people's political participation or not REASONS: 2-4, 13 not interesting enough 12 is too difficult to accurately record/operationalize 18 not closely relevant enough to our survey. Although I think assessing BC knowledge of the HST is a good idea and we should have a question that tries to do this. 21 since I don't really care for seeing if participation increases(we already know it does, which is why we are having a referendum in the first place). You might disagree with these deletes, if so, say so. but we need to finalize this survey promptly. --DannyUrquhart 18:42, 9 October 2010 (UTC)
I think there's some conncetion between Q6 and Q19. Maybe we should put the 2questions in to one,,and Q6 will be the part follows Q19
19. There will be a referendum held in September 2011, will you be participating in this referendum?
(1) Yes
(2) No
6. If you were to vote in the upcoming referendum regarding the HST would you vote for: (1) Repealing the HST (2) Keeping the HST (9) Unknown/Prefer not to answer
YI FANG
Hi Guyz,
I just joined this topic now. Well I have added two questions to this page, question 21 and 22. I figured question 21 is important because the fact that Gordon Campbell did not tell people he would end up implementing the HST stirred up a great deal of controversy. Give me your feedback, and let me know if you also think question 21 is important. I figured Question 22 would also be important because the anti-HST movement by Bill Vander Zalm turned out to be quite effective, with a great deal of people participating. Let me know if you think I should come up with different questions!
-Sarah Grewal
I just want to comment about the research question regarding the relationship between tax increase and increase in political participation. This seems to lead to the assumption that tax increase is a means to increase political participation in the future. We are not trying to find out if this is a positive trend that governments can follow to increase political participation by increasing tax. Tax increase is not a desirable measure in this regard. The current issue about the HST is about bad taxation policy and its political consequence that we have to find out in our survey. The research question can be, as I previously raised, whether this will hurt the Liberal party in the recall and improve the NDP's chances of winning the next election, or it can be if this will negatively or positively affect the economy of BC. Or it can be about the opinion of the public about the effectiveness of direct engagement in politics like initiated by the Anti-HST campaign.
Once we figure out the proper survey question, then we can select the most relevant questions from the list and improve or add.
Laeke
I really, really think that we're just tripping up if we try and find one single research question to tailor our survey questions to. Once again, this is an omnibus survey. We're not trying to build a theory, rather we're trying to find interesting facts that other people can use in their theories. interesting=what other people will use.
If you really want to, you can come up with 5 different theories for us to put questions to test, but I'm very unsure that that is our agenda.
--DannyUrquhart 18:55, 10 October 2010 (UTC)
So, all we gotta do is picking the top 5 most interesting questions?? then,,let's just vote,,see which 5 are the top 5.
I coincide with Laeke on his proposition to find out if the anti HST movement has enough support to vote out the Liberal MLAs. After we ask: Do you support the HST, we could follow up with my question, Will the HST effect your voting strategy in the next election. If we get a majority of yes answers we can have an idea of the political fallout. By the way thank you Louisa for pointing out my mistake. When I was writing question 16 I meant if it passed the referendum I just simplified it now. Again, I think we should consider using it because it will give us a good idea of the change in public opinion.
Miguel Pereirinha
9. Are you for or against the HST? 1. For 2. Against 10. How would you rate your feeling about the HST? 1. Very favourable 2. Somewhat favourable 3. Indifferent 4. less favourable 5. strongly unfavourable
I think we can delete question 9 because the answer we get from question 10 will determine if they or for or against the HST. If our dependent and independent variables are voter participation and taxes then I agree with Amanda that our survey questions should focus on British Columbian's feelings toward the HST and if and how they are going to vote in the referendum and upcoming election. Miguel Pereirinha
We seem to all agree on a few questions, so I think we should start listing the 5 questions that we are going to use to measure this variable. We are only allowed to choose five, and we seemed to have narrowed the questions down to the ones that will be the most valid. The concensus seems to be this:
9. Are you for or against the HST? 1. For 2. Against 10. How would you rate your feeling about the HST? 1. Very favourable 2. Somewhat favourable 3. Indifferent 4. less favourable 5. strongly unfavourable 19. There will be a referendum held in September 2011, will you be participating in this referendum? (1) Yes (2) No (3) Don't know
As I said before, I think that we should include #8 in our survey questions. Do you feel that the HST favours businesses over the average working person? (yes/no). It gives us more insight into how people feel about the equality of benefits that the HST delivers. It also gives us reasons why an anti-HST sentiment exists if people answer "yes." --Amanda Mackaay 19:10, 11 October 2010 (UTC)
I agree with Miguel that Questions 9 and 10 seem to be duplicates in different forms. I do prefer the range of question 10.
I would like to see questions: 1.Do you feel BC Residents benefit from the HST? (1) Yes (2) No (9) Unknown/Prefer not to answer 6. If you were to vote in the upcoming referendum regarding the HST would you vote for: (1) Repealing the HST (2) Keeping the HST (9) Unknown/Prefer not to answer 10. How would you rate your feeling about the HST? 1. Very favourable 2. Somewhat favourable 3. Indifferent 4. less favourable 5. strongly unfavourable 14. Do you agree that the HST will actually facilitate long term good for the eeconomy like the government says. 5=Strongly Agree 4=Agree 3=Somwhat agree 2=Disagree 1=Strongly disagree 0=dont know enough about it to form an opinion 19. There will be a referendum held in September 2011, will you be participating in this referendum? (1) Yes (2) No
I think these questions will focus on the public opinion towards the HST rather than the consequences that should be associated with the implementation/results of the HST. Danny makes a good point of how we shouldn't be too specific with regards to a theory, but rather to focus on questions that will garner public opinion.
Horace
I think 1, 10, 14, 16 and 19 can be useful questions for our survey. These questions will allow us to figure out if people are in favour of the HST, are likely to vote in the next referendum and if their feelings towards the Liberals have changed with its introduction.
Miguel Pereirinha
I think questions 1,6,8,10, and 19 are really good choices for our survey questions. However, I'm just not too sure about the -10/+10 scale for question 8. Instead, maybe we can word it something like: 8. Who do you believe benefits most from the HST? (1) businesses (2) the general public (3) benefits are evenly distributed (4) don't know
Louisa Young
Hey guys. I have added questions 23 and 24 in order to get some indication of how closely connected the HST backlash is to how the tax was introduced by Gordon Campbell and his popularity (sort of an expansion on question 21), rather than treating the HST as an isolated phenomenon. My guess is that Campbell's resignation would lessen the anger over the HST (maybe only temporarily?) because his lie about not considering the HST in BC during the last election seems to be the main basis of outrage over the tax. Also, question 26 was added because I think it is important to have an understanding of what types of taxes people agree with/ don't agree with before we can make sense of how they feel about the HST. Maybe there are socioeconomic divisions on the HST we could infer from such a question when combined with annual income (ie. rich people may be more tolerant of HST than the poor so long as income taxes are low because of their ability to afford high consumption taxes, and vice versa with low- income people).
John Matautia
Hey everyone. I think questions 23 and 24 are good, because HST has really affected the popularity of Gordon Campbell, he has the lowest popularity level a B.C. premier has ever had. It would be good to know whether his level of popularity has dropped due to the fact that people are not in favour of the HST, or if it was because they don't approve of some of Campbell's decisions. Number 8 is very important, because whether the HST favours businesses or the average joe is a question many have been debating. It is also necessary to keep the question that asks what decision you are likely to make in the referendum. Let me know what you guyz think!
-Sarah Grewal
I would go with questions 1, 6, 8, 10 and 19. Since these questions raise a range of issues around the HST, they will be good choice; however,question 8 should be modified to the following to reflect public opinion on the effect of HST on the economy. The debate has been it hurts the economy generally not business or consumers discriminately. It is known to affect business badly considering Canadian shoppers going south of the border.
Q 8. In your opinion, do you think the HST will hurt or benefit the economy? 1. hurt 2. benefit. 0. Will have no impact either way.
Another question I would not leave out has to do with the recall by the Ant-HST. Q ~ would you take part in a recall against Liberal MLA in your riding to protest the HST? 1. Yes 2. No 0. Not interested in poletics This would measure the potence of public respons to a political protest in BC.
Laeke
Way too complicated guys,
Edit into my 'post' your preferred vote include your two initials. Once we have our five questions, then we can work on getting them how we want them. You have 5 votes. Voting ends in 48 hours(10am Thursday), because we need to get this done by next Monday --DannyUrquhart 16:35, 12 October 2010 (UTC) 1......A.M. L.Y.
5......
6......DU,A.M. L.Y.
7......DU,
8. ....DU,A.M. L.Y.
9/10...A.M, L.Y.
14.....
17.....
15.....
16.....
17(b)..
19..... L.Y.
20.....
21.....
22.....
23.....
24.....DU,A.M.
25.....
26.....
27.....
I agree, I think question 24 is a necessary question that we should have in our survey. If we want to get an accurate measure of the HST then we want to know WHY people are unhappy with it. It is quite possible that Campbell is the reason that people are so unhappy with the HST because there has been lots of discontent about his policies in the past. If HST unhappiness is linked to Campbell unhappiness then it will give us a more insight into people's reasonings for their anti-HST sentiments.If Campbell was no longer the premier then maybe people would be more optmistic about this new tax if it was being run by a premier that they were satisfied with. And I like the new revised question 8! --Amanda Mackaay 04:03, 14 October 2010 (UTC)
It looks like everyone quit paying attention after assignment 1 was due.... Alright, 10 more hours(9:00pm Oct 14), and I'm just going to delete everything that wasn't voted for. We have only four days left to finish the survey....--DannyUrquhart 18:25, 14 October 2010 (UTC)
Took some time to clean up the questions page a little bit. It's a little more organized now, and so that might make it easier for us to make our decision on the top 5 questions(I hope).
Louisa Young
It's well past the voting deadline so i deleted everything that wasn't voted for. There are 7 questions left. I didn't delete all of them because I think that certain questions overlap. 6 and 19 overlap. 1 and 8 overlap.
7 questions is workable, so for the weekend the project is just to make sure we're 100% satisfied with the wording. Then we'll cut out the two that are most troublesome on Sunday. --DannyUrquhart 16:08, 15 October 2010 (UTC)
Hey,
I read the wording of the questions, and it seems fine to me. We just need to get rid of 2 questions and work with 5.
Sarah Grewal
Took out the 2 questions that got the least votes, but they are still there on the page under the "remaining questions" heading. Anyone still want to reword some questions, or is this going to be our final five?
Louisa Young
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