Projects

This Faculty Development Scheme funded project plans to build a prototype of Chinese language CST, based on PHQ-9 and GAD-7 respectively. We plan to get real users to try it out; and evaluate the practicality and usefulness of such an approach. The CST we plan to build will be based on two popular screening questionnaires: PHQ-9, GAD-7 and achieve the following : An online, interactive, context-aware chatbot for screening on different assessments including PHQ-9 and GAD-7. It will be more accurate, and the extraction method is more natural. A reporting engine can itemize issues related to detected symptoms to obtain more useful information for reference.

We are playing supporting roles, especially on impact evaluation, and applying AI technology to it. We can call it impact evaluation. The bigger project are Jockey Club ParentChat, and SJS 656 Carer support projects.

This is a project collaborating with the Christian Family Service Center (CFSC), to assess the daily activities of elderly individuals receiving CFSC services, their mobility ability measured by different methods, and other (psychological) factors. This assessment has three main objectives: to understand the daily activities of the elderly, to provide reference information for frontline staff, and to explore the necessary service improvements and long-term development directions based on the elderly's activity capabilities.

We are doing a project for Oxfam, studying whether current MPF scheme should be changed to allow (partial) early withdrawal for home purchase for owner occupancy.

This pilot study, in partnership with Hong Kong Catholic Commission on Labour Affairs (CCLA), will examine the availability of data on jobs that attract the largest number of migrant labourers, including but not limited to waiter/waitress, cooks, retail worker, and security guards, and to explore a longitudinal study on trends regarding number of employees and imported laborers, and wages for these jobs. More attention will be paid to the vulnerable employees: females, older workers, and ethnic minority groups with low-income. In addition to exploring the availability of data from C&SD and other government departments, the impact of importation of migrant workers to local labourers will be gathered through interviews with affected employees and employers of imported laborers.

In this research project, we seek to apply data science to help analyze and understand these important measure for population health and well-being. In recent years, Hong Kong is doing very well in terms of Life Expectancy, ranking first in the world. What did Hong Kong do well (and not so well) to achieve this position? What is the Quality of Life of the Elderly as they age? The Healthy Life Expectancy measures the span of life without dependency on carers, and indirectly gives some indication of expected need for social services as a population ages. Can we use existing social services data to measure (estimate) Healthy Life Expectancy, to help plan for social policies in this area? These are some of the questions we study in this project. For this project, we have done a study of the question “why Hong Kong ranks first in the world in life expectancy” from data analysis perspective, and are starting some collaboration with academics abroad.

Partially supported by Oxfam, we have been doing analysis on how to accurately measure poverty in Hong Kong. Besides using the simple relative poverty approach, we have also done analysis based on the deprivation approach and tried to find factors associated with poverty through correlation analysis.

It is common for medium and large scale NGOs to provide different social services (such as elderly care, rehabilitation, family services). Yet the service related data are buried in different software systems procured from different vendors over time. In order to analyze the data, it is necessary to first systematically extract and clean the data, and standardize it into a common framework. Once that is done, we can make use of the data for Know-Your-Customer (KYC), and service planning and operation improvement studies. Furthermore, such NGO data contain useful information for government policy studies, for improving social welfare services for the whole community. For this project, we are collaborating with Christian Family Service Centers, doing a multi-phased project.

For this project, we are collaborating with a social service media company BigSilver to build a recommendation engine for their Carer Chat mobile app (啱傾), to give individualized recommendation to users. The Carer Chat mobile app, while providing similar functions as other social media platforms, is aimed at providing educational content and community support to carers, making the design of the recommendation system an interesting research project.

For this project, we are collaborating with Chow Tak Fook to understand their successful drive Wu Wu Cheng (戶互撐) in distributing aids to the needy through a community engagement process.

This evaluation project addresses the impacts of establishing an informal social support network in the lower income grassroots community during the outbreak of the fifth wave of COVID-19 pandemic in Hong Kong. Research found that one way to build informal social support network for marginal and vulnerable groups is via the mediation of social service providers or non-governmental organisations. These institutions create opportunities to gather a group of people for community members to embed their own social networks with other participants and staff and establish their community resilience in this regard.

However, we know very little about the pattern of the newly established network, the mechanisms, and conditions which account for the network building process, the resources embedded in it and its impacts on the community members. To fill in these gaps, this study works together with the Wu Wu Cheng community support programme to identify and evaluate such impacts, uncover the structure of the social network generated by the project, and the network building process. The study will adopt the mixed method social network perspective in the investigation. The data collected can create a model of the informal social support network, consolidate knowledge for the planning, design, and implementation of future community projects, provide substantial indicators to measure the social impacts in terms of informal social support network, and create a measurement framework for the future community projects.

This study, which is being funded by Oxfam Hong Kong, aims to develop a policy framework for measuring poverty and setting poverty alleviation targets in Hong Kong. The study consists of two phases.

During the first phase, the research team investigated the issue of current poverty measurement methods in Hong Kong and developed various frameworks and a data collection process for assessing poverty in Hong Kong. This was achieved by reviewing poverty measures and alleviation targets in eight different countries and regions around the world.

In the second phase of the study, the research team will implement a direct data collection process with 2,000 households using a stratified representative sampling method. The data collected will enable the team to determine poverty thresholds, corresponding poverty rates in Hong Kong, and propose targets for poverty alleviation. Based on the study's findings, the research team will discuss and provide recommendations for appropriate poverty measures and targets for poverty alleviation in Hong Kong.

This study tries to find out factors shaping informal caregivers' caring experiences. As informal caregivers have very heavy burdens, increasing number of caregiver hotline services have been carried out. The aim of the hotline services is to provide convenient and accessible services to informal caregivers, such as information, sharing frustration or other assistance. Unlike studies that collect data from questionnaires, focus group or in-depth interviews, the content of each phone call can be varied. This characteristic exposes the complex of the caring journey, such as source of stress, difficulties they have and so forth. More importantly, it can reflect the intersection of different demographic and social factors and impacts of this intersectionality on the caring journey. To capture this complex and intersectionality, with caregivers' consents, the phone call will be recorded. The recordings will be transcribe verbatim via computer programme and text analysis will be conducted. Findings of this hotline analysis contribute to the future operations of caregiver hotline services. The clustering analysis may categorise callers (informal caregivers) into different types. This categorisation helps service providers to prepare immediate response to callers and plan services to meet needs of different types of caregivers.

This is a collaboration project with HKCSS and SDU Platform to study the feasibility and implications of setting up a rent control model for SDUs. The recent rent control Ordinance only regulates the increase in rental charges, length of tenancy agreement, and transparency of electricity and water charges, without putting a cap on the initial rental charges. The financial burden of the SDU tenants remain very much the same. The project attempts to use existing data of SDU survey collected by HKCSS, Rateable values of private flats released by RV Depart., and existing rental charge of SDUs to develop a simple, data-driven model on rental control on SDUs. Such model, in the first place, should be able to provide better knowledge and improve the bargaining power of the tenants, but at the same time it has to maintain the healthy functioning of the SDU market.