Description:
This data set contains the responses given by municipal officials from an online survey of violence experiences. The data set has 35 variables and 448 cases.
Abstract:
This study was commissioned as an update on a baseline study conducted by the South African Local Government Association (SALGA) in 2016 and stems from the growing number of acts of political violence against local government level politicians and officials.
The Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) fielded an online questionnaire survey of the experiences of violence by councillors, ward committee members and municipal officials. It yielded responses from 448 respondents during the period November 2018 to March 2019.
Subject areas and major variables covered in the data set included:
Violence exposure of respondents
Remedial actions undertaken and the outcomes
Effects of violence on the person; private and professional
Links of violence to protest actions
Basic demographic variables
Self-completion
Web-based self-completion
Municipal councillors, managers, officials and ward committee members.
This online survey targeted as many municipal officials on local government level possible. A sample size of 448 respondents was obtained, with 387 participants answering most of the questions. Cases where respondents only provided demographic data and a position held within the municipality and did not complete the other questions in the questionnaire because they were no longer interested in proceeding with the questions were retained due to the importance of demographic data.
Of the 387 participants to the SALGA-HSRC study, more than half (57.8%) were local public councillors and about one-quarter (24.8%) were municipal officials. The rest were members of ward committees (9, 8%), municipal managers (3, 1%) or unspecified (4, 5%). With the largest numbers of responses from Gauteng (20, 1%), Eastern Cape (19, 9%) and the Western Cape (15, 2%).
The ratio of females to males from whom responses were received was approximately 40:60.
