SECTION II Literature Review
Chapter 7 Methodology
7.8. Describing the context
7.8.1. Community profiles
effectiveness and the willingness of individuals to become volunteers offering PSS to children. These were investigated by Gothan (2003) who interviewed the SP participants to explore the factors that motivate people to volunteer in the current research contexts. Her work falls outside of the focus of the current study but contributes to our understanding of the process of volunteering. In the current study, the usual demographic variables, and measures of community cohesion and religious orientation were collected. It was also opportune to describe household composition, living conditions, socioeconomic factors and personal exposure to the HIV/AIDS pandemic. The Community Profile Questionnaire (CPQ) was developed to measure these variables (See Appendix G). The questions were designed to include information pertaining to the individual respondent as well as requesting the respondent to reflect on how his or her own position compared to other members of his/her community. The variables considered in the CPQ are:
1. Basic biographical data included age, gender, educational and marital status, religious affiliation, personal experience of death and AIDS-related illness and the length of time that the respondent had been resident in the community.
2. Household demographics in terms of (i) number of people in various age ranges resident in the respondent's home; (ii) socioeconomic variables included the amount and source of income as well as access to social grants; and (iii) housing conditions with respect to the structure and facilities in the respondents' homes. Respondents were requested to indicate their personal circumstances and compare themselves with others in their community.
3. An opinion survey on the nature of problems affecting children in their communities. The questions used to select partnering communities were repeated as a cross-check on the earlier more informal surveying (See 7.5) of the nature of problems that beset children and prevalence of HIV/AIDS (indicated on the basis of recent upsurge in mortality rates).
4. Religious commitment and practice in terms of the meaning that prayer and other religious practices have in die respondents' lives. Spiritual beliefs have been documented as important motivators for people to help others (Mailman, 2002). The commandment to help others, especially those in great need, is integral to all religious teachings. It was interesting to note that at all of the community meetings, the chairperson (always a community member) began the meeting by requesting that someone volunteer to lead prayers and perhaps a hymn as well. In most of the meetings, closure was similarly marked with prayer and/or hymns.
5. The Neighborhood Cohesion Instrument (NCI) (Buckner, 1988) ascertains the degree of commumty cohesion and satisfaction to be part of a particular community. Much has been written about the collectivist ideology that forms the foundation of Afrocentric cultures (Kelly, 2002; Mkhize, 2004;
Swartz, 1998). In addition to disregarding basic human rights, the apartheid regime was a system of social engineering that worked to destroy indigenous, social and domestic structures (Editorial, Natal Witness, 13 Sept 2002, p. 12). The process of fragmenting communities was an integral aspect of the apartheid regime and the faction fighting that it created (Lachman et al., 2002; Higson-Smith & Killian, 2000). Consequently, it was plausible that the collectivist nature of African societies had been severely eroded in terms of day-to-day applicability in people's lives. It was thus necessary to measure 'sense of community' as this had the potential to differentiate between communities in which the programme was effective and those in which there was a lack of success.
The 18-question NCI was administered as part of the CPQ. Respondents indicated agreement or disagreement to the various statements. It had been designed to measure a synthesis of three inter-related concepts: (i) psychological sense of community; (ii) attraction-to-neighbourhood; and (iii) social interaction (Buckner, 1988). It has been used effectively to evaluate community intervention strategies (ibid.), and can yield the collective attribute of community cohesion as well as individual sense of belonging to a community. The collective-level of analysis is obtained by considering inter-subject consistency and by utilising aggregated responses to characterise the cohesiveness within a specific community (ibid.).
Neighbourhood is a concept that was deemed to be unfamiliar to the participants in the current study.
Thus, the word 'neighbourhood' was replaced with 'community'. In the original standardisation of this questionnaire, 206 residents in three diverse neighbourhoods showed that the questionnaire had good internal consistency (a= 0.95), adequate test-retest reliability (ranging from a = 0.64 to a = 0.92), discriminatory power and criterion-related validity in the assessment of neighbourhood cohesion (ibid.).
The three subscales were subsumed under one cognate factor of neighbourhood cohesion on the basis of high loadings of all three subscales on a single rotated factor, labelled "sense of community/cohesion"
(Buckner, 1988, p. 779).
Translation of the CPQ took place according to the procedures outlined in Section 7.6 above. The CPQ was administered to approximately 20 community members from each of the nine partnering communities. Purposeful random sampling, combining systematic and randomised selection of respondents was used (Patton, 1990). Participants were asked to volunteer to complete the CPQ and if it seemed that there was too much homogeneity amongst those who volunteered, participants from other groups were asked if they would be willing to complete the questionnaire. The people who completed
the CPQ were not necessarily representative of the community as a whole. The homogeneity within most partnering communities was apparent and the high percentage of respondents from each SP seemed to adequately serve the purpose of describing the circumstances of the SP participants and their communities.
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The w/Zw/w-speaking research assistant asked individuals if they were willing to complete the questionnaires. The ethics and their rights in this regard were explained to them. If the person appeared keen and motivated, the research assistant helped them to complete the questionnaire (low literacy rates required assistance for many of the participants to complete forms). Special attention was given to establishing the boundaries of confidentiality between the respondent, the research assistant and the researcher. The data was then coded and entered into a database for analysis. The name of the respondent and their contact details were not captured. The completed questionnaires are kept in locked files. The data was analysed primarily for descriptive statistics.
7.8.2. Description of the Community Context:
254 people participated in the SP that was conducted in the nine communities. On average 28 people participated each time that the SP was conducted. Three communities from each of the different geographic regions (rural, peri-urban and township) were selected (see 7.5). The differentiation between the geographic regions was consistent with the communities' own categorisation of the regions and were very obvious when one visited particular areas. Various difficulties were encountered in the informal settlements resulting in these communities being dropped from the study (see 7.5.2.).
177 (69.69% of the total) of the SP participants (a quote sample of approximately 20 people from each community) completed the Community Profile Questionnaire (CPQ)1. 73,4% of the respondents were females and 26,6% were males (See Figure 7.1). The spread across geographical regions indicates that 31 % (n= 54) of the respondents were from rural areas, 37% (n=65) were from peri-urban areas and 33%
(n = 58) from townships (See Figure 7.2). There were gender and age differences across the geographic regions, with very few men from rural areas participating. In two of the rural areas, there were no male participants at all. This was an interesting feature in that the Amakhosi in their two areas had decided that the community would hold elections to decide who would be the community representatives to take responsibility for the vulnerable children. Although men who expressed an interest
' Most of the data in this chapter will be presented in terms of percentages in order to facilitate comparison across the different variables.
in serving their community by offering PSS to vulnerable children, the voting perhaps demonstrated a community attitude that women are better suited to the task of caring for children.
Figure 7.1: Percentage of CPO respondents by gender and geographic region:
The mean age of the CPQ respondents was 31.2 years, with a standard deviation of 13,27, and an age range of 15 to 72 years. Young people were especially prevalent in the peri-urban groups, probably since youth groups affiliated with a local NGO were selected as an access point in some communities. The rural groups did not include people in the older age groups. Note that the pie charts in Figure 7.2 indicate the percentage of people in each age group from the different regions.
Figure 7.2: Age distribution by geographic regions (% frequencies).
Township Pen-Urban
Over 55 - 6.9% 15-24-13.8* Older than 44 - 4 6%
Rural
25-34 - 35 2%
In terms of religious affiliation, 42% were Christians, 20% Zionists, 17,6% Catholic and 20,5%
denoted the 'other' category. The rank ordering of responses in the 'other' category indicates
"Born-Again" Christians, Shembe, Traditional and None. There were geographic differences in terms of religious affiliation, with Zionism being more prevalent in the rural areas (Table 7.4).
separate possible responses since Catholics are Christians. However, it is believed that those who attend the Roman Catholic Church responded as Catholics. Many of the respondents indicated that they were Christian and then wrote in Methodist or Anglican.
The majority of the respondents (78%) indicated that they pray on a daily basis, while 1,7%
indicated that prayer was not important in their daily lives and no one admitted to never praying (See Table 7.5). The commitment to a deep spiritual life was further demonstrated when all meetings began and ended with prayers and hymns. An individual would spontaneously volunteer to lead the prayers and then thank God for all of His Blessings and ask for assistance in carrying out God's Will to develop their communities and help the children. These heartfelt prayers were extremely relevant to the material covered in meetings. The hymn singing was spiritually moving and extremely beautiful.
Table 7.4: CPO respondents' religious affiliation bv geographic regions:
Religion Christian Zionist Catholic Other
Rural 31,5%
25,9%
24,1%
18,5%
Peri-urban 33,8%
24,6%
15,4%
24,6%
Township 60,3
8,6 13,8%
17,2%
Total 41,8%
19,8%
17,5%
20,5%
Table 7.5: CPS respondents' prayer life by geographic region:
Prayer is part of daily life
Pray at formal ceremonies Pray in times of need
Never Pray Prayer has little importance
Peri-urban 43 (63%)
0 (0%) 23 (34%) 2 (3%) 0 (0%)
Rural 47 (76%)
2 (3%) 11(18%) 1 (1.5%) 1 (1.5%)
Township 48 (69%)
2 (3%) 17(24%) 1 (1%) 2 (3%)
Total 138 (69%)
4 (2%) 51 (25.5%)
4 (2%) 3(1.5%)
Most (77,3%) of the respondents described themselves as single1, 15,9% were married and 4,5%
were widowed. No one was divorced. The respondents had an average of 1,68 children, with a standard deviation of 1,8. Many respondents had no children and some had up to ten children
The local cultural tradition requires the payment of bride price - lobola, -many couples regard themselves as single
(See Figure 7.3). The older individuals were more likely to have several children, while many o f the younger respondents had no children.
The mean number of people living in each household was 8,66, with a standard deviation o f 4.1 and a range o f 2 to 24 people in one household. This suggests that most of the respondents live with extended family. Furthermore, the larger household compositions were found among the rural respondents (see Figure 7.4).
Figure 7.3' Number of children per respondent:
Figure 7,4: Number of people per household by geographic regions:
Peri-urban Rurai Township
JL
2 5 5 0 7 5 10 0 12 5 15 0 17 5 2 0 0 2 2 5 2 5 0 2 4 5.0 7 4 1 0 4 1 2 4 19.0 1 7 4 20.0 22.5 2 5 5.0 7 4 10.0 1 2 4 14.0 1 7 4 2 0 4I ^ ,B
Household Total Household Total Household Total
Across all of the communities, 38% of CPQ respondents had attained Grade 12 education, with 6.2% having a diploma or degree (see Figure 7.6). Most of the tertiary education qualifications had been obtained through correspondence colleges in fields such as business, computer skills or nursing. There were no diplomats or graduates among this sample of rural respondents. 10.7% of
all respondents had only primary level education, with the majority of the under-educated individuals being older women from rural communities.
Figure 7.6: Educational Status of the CPQ Respondents:
so •
40 •
30 '
20 •
* 10 •
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