DOI: 10.14749/1437976512
title: The moral ecology of South Africa's township youth (IKASI) 2004-05: Western Cape. Interviews 1 and 3 - A qualitative study

description: Description: 
 The data set consists of 37 first and 34 third transcribed interviews with South Africa's township youth in the Western Cape.

 Participants came from one class in a Langa township school, and from one class in a nearby suburban school. The sample is 37, 31 from the township school and 6 from the suburban school. The six participants from the suburban school all live in Langa. Not all participants from the township school live in Langa.
Abstract: 
 Voices of young people who live in a context of poverty are largely unheard in the study of morality. Instead moral debates are dominated by strictly bounded academic discourses, official calls for 'moral regeneration' and moral panics. Furthermore, the emphasis on individual moral development has neglected the socio-cultural contexts of young people's moral formation. In contrast, this study offers a complex youth ethnography of the moral sphere that explores how young people living in a context of poverty understand the concept of morality and how this construction facilitates their processes of moral formation.

 The study is located in Langa, a peri-urban township (ikasi) near Cape Town, South Africa, and follows 37 young men and women aged between 14 and 20, over the course of a year. The majorities of youth were in Grade 9 and attended a township school, while a small group attended a nearby suburban school.

 The research design combines the usual elements of ethnography with multiple creative methods designed to engage youth over the course of a year. Included in these methods are: auto photography, free lists, mind maps and a rank ordering activity.

 The study produces findings in three main areas. On a descriptive level, it provides an account of the moral lives of vulnerable young people from within a context of partial-parenting, partial-schooling, pervasive poverty and inequality, and in the aftermath of the moral injustices of Apartheid. On an analytical level, it shows how these young people exhibit conventional values in some areas, contested values in others as well as postmodern values especially regarding authority and self-authorization. It identifies young people's social representations of morality as action (what you do), as embodied (who you are and who others are to you) and as located or inevitable (where you are i.e. in school, at home, off the streets, or simply in ikasi. On a theoretical level it offers the term moral capital, and moral ecology to broaden discourse on young people's moral lives.
description: N=37 young people who reside or went to school the in the suburb of Langa which is located in the Western Cape were included in this study. All 37 participants participated in the first individual interview, 35 participated in a second interview (focussed on photographs taken about their moral lives) and 34 in a third interview.
description: Access to schools: The Western Cape Education Department (WCED) was approached for permission to conduct research in state schools.

 School selection: Both township and suburban schools were included in a list of possible schools so that the researcher would have a range of youth included in the study. Of the eight schools chosen, five were in Langa and three were suburban-based schools. Heads of schools were telephoned or met with and five of the eight schools were amenable to having research conducted in the schools. As most of the township schools were similar, the one with easiest accessibility (close to a main thoroughfare) was selected and similarly one suburban school was selected.

 Sampling process: The sampling process began with an initial period of observation at the two schools until the researcher became familiar enough with the students to approach them for participation in the study. A group of six Grade 11 young women became a "Reference Group" and the stimulus instruments were piloted with this group. The actual target group was Grade 9 pupils as this group of young people are in middle adolescence and were considered mature enough to discuss abstract phenomena , communicate views and have accumulated a level of life experience that sets them apart from their younger counterparts.

 The table on p. 58 in the thesis provides a summary of the composition of the sample. Please refer to the thesis for this project at the following link: http://www.theyouthinstitute.org/e107_files/public/swartz_2007_-_the_moral_ecology_of_south_africas_township_youth_part_1.pdf