DOI: 10.3886/icpsr22211
title: Afrobarometer Round 3: The Quality of Democracy and Governance in South Africa, 2005
title: Archival Version

description: The Afrobarometer project was designed to assess attitudes toward democracy, governance, economic reform, quality of life, and civil society in several sub-Saharan African nations, and to track the evolution of such attitudes in those nations over time. This particular survey was concerned with the attitudes and opinions of the citizens of South Africa. Respondents in a face-to-face interview were asked to rate South Africa's President Thabo Mbeki and his administration's overall performance, to state the most important issues facing the nation, and to evaluate the effectiveness of certain continental and international institutions. Opinions were gathered on the role of the government in improving the economy, whether corruption existed in local and national government, whether government officials were responsive to problems of the general population, and whether local government officials, the police, the courts, the overall criminal justice system, the media, the National Electoral Commission, and the government broadcasting service could be trusted. Respondents were polled on their knowledge of government officials, their level of personal involvement in political, governmental, and community affairs, their participation in national elections, the inclusiveness of the government, and the identification of causes of conflict and resources that may aid in the resolution of conflict. Economic questions addressed the past, present, and future of the country's and the respondent's economic condition, and whether great income disparities are fair. Societal questions were asked of respondents concerning the meaning of being "poor" and "rich," monetary support systems, personal responsibility for success or failure, characteristics used in self-identification, methods for securing food, water, schooling, medical services, news and information, and ease of obtaining assistance for certain services. Background variables include age, gender, ethnicity, education, religious affiliation and participation, political party affiliation, language spoken most at home, whether the respondent was head of household, current and past employment status, whether a close friend or relative had died from AIDS, language used in interview, and type of physical disability, if any. In addition, demographic information pertaining to the interviewer is provided, as well as their response to the interview, observations of the respondent's attitude during the interview and of the interview environment.
description: Weighting variable, WITHINWT, adjusts the distribution of the sample based on individual selection probabilities (i.e., based on province, gender, urban-rural distribution, and size of household and enumeration area). Please refer to the codebook for more information on weighting.
description: Response Rates: Approximately 87 percent.
description: The sample is designed as a representative cross-section of all citizens of voting age in a given country. The goal is to give every adult citizen an equal and known chance of selection for interview. This objective was reached by (a) strictly applying random selection methods at every stage of sampling and by (b) applying sampling with probability proportionate to population size wherever possible. A randomly selected sample of 1,200 cases allows inferences to national adult populations with a margin of sampling error of no more than plus or minus 2.5 percent with a confidence level of 95 percent. If the sample size is increased to 2,400, the confidence interval shrinks to plus or minus 2 percent. For more information in regard to sampling, please refer to the "Sampling" section of the ICPSR codebook.
description: Datasets: DS1: Afrobarometer Round 3: The Quality of Democracy and Governance in South Africa, 2005
description: All adult citizens of South Africa. Smallest Geographic Unit: county
description: face-to-face interviewTo preserve respondent confidentiality, the variable DISTRICT has been recoded to "BLANKED", and variable Q1 has been top coded at 80 in the public-use version of this collection.In producing the full product suite of files, variables DATEINTR, STRTIME, and ENDTIME have been changed from date to string variables. As a result, they have moved from their original positions in the data file to the end of the variable list.In this collection, many variables have response categories with longer value labels in the codebook, as compared to those found in the data. Please refer to the codebook for full value labels. Also, some variable and value labels in the codebook do not fully correspond to those found in the data.Additional information about the Afrobarometer Survey can be found at the Afrobarometer Web site.