Furthermore, the respondent were asked to rank the familiarity on the piracy issue in the Somali waters. The table shows that majority of the responded have ranked very little familiarity with the issue. More than half of the respondents ranked little familiarity , out of which a quarter of the total respondent marked a familiarity of 1, only 4 responded have claimed strong familiarity with the issue. The data shows that the general public in Hong Kong does not have a very high understanding of the piracy actions in the Indian ocean.
To facilitate the collection of data with rich and in depth understanding of the issue, we chose some of the respondents from the countries that suffer loses from piracy issues directly. A Total of 12 respondents were from those countries, 7 from India, 2 from Sri Lanka , 2 from Indonesia and 1 from Malaysia. We assumed they would have better knowledge of the piracy issue and it would expedite the data collected.
To ascertain whether our respondents were indeed telling the truth about their knowledge on piracy, we inserted four questions that would test their factual knowledge. We hoped that the respondents would have a moral conduct and not google the answers and from what we gather, we can assume they had not.
We first asked them if they knew about the actual number of pirate attacks that occurred in 2011,
We offered multiple choices, this was to aid recall of the facts if necessary. According to the International Maritime Bureau, as of, 2011, 439 pirate attacks took place in the Indian Ocean(Mukundan 2012). As you can see from below only 22%