Methodology12
A 66 item interview instrument for individual interviews was developed for the study and enumerators were
trained. The questionnaire was built upon and expanded on the questionnaire developed for the first stage of the
study. The questionnaire was piloted, corrected, and then finalised. The interviewers were deployed into the
same Districts as for the first phase, in an attempt to get a matched sample but the enumerators were unable to
easily use the same subjects from the first phase, and thus the attempt was abandoned and the interviewers
concentrated on getting as large a sample as possible. The only exclusion factor was age (under 18 years),
otherwise all women willing to be interviewed were included.
The interviewers were all members of TWT community facilitation team, and most had participated in the first
phase, thus minimising the amount of training needed. The separation of women into rural and urban was done
on the basis of their response to the question about where the respondent usually lived: rural, urban, peri-urban,
or farming community. The rural group was the combined “rural” and “farming community” respondents,
whilst the urban group was the combined “urban” and “peri-urban” respondents.
The data was entered into a purpose-built Access database, cleaned, and analysed in SPSS (version 20). A total
of 946 original questionnaires were received, with 903 complete questionnaires finally being available for
analysis; this was a 96% return rate, which was a highly acceptable rate of return. Table 1 shows the breakdown
of the overall sample by District.
Although there have been interesting findings about the comparatively stronger approval for traditional leaders
by older rural women, this could not be tested with this data as the questions related to traditional leaders were
restricted only to whether these should be involved in mobilising voters or choosing candidates. This was too
restrictive a domain for useful cross-tabulations.
Since the data was mostly frequency counts, cross-tabulations were carried out testing the hypothesis that there
were significant differences between rural and urban women in their reporting on the 2013 elections. Only
significant scores (p>0.01) are reported.
Table 1: Breakdown of the survey sample by district
12
District
No.
%
Bulawayo
Gokwe
Goromonzi
Gutu
Harare/Chitungwiza
Marondera
Matopos
Mazowe
Nkayi
Wedza
Zvimba
Zvishavane
Total:
92
105
0
42
206
52
10
91
105
0
2
104
903
10.2
11.7
0.0
4.7
22.6
5.8
11.5
10.1
11.7
0.0
0.2
11.5
A more detailed description of the methodology and the demographic breakdown of the samples is provided in the first report. See
again RAU & TWT (2014), Does encouraging women to register and vote make a difference? A Preliminary Report on Women’s Experiences with Elections.
Prepared by Caroline Kache, Researcher [RAU]. April 2014. HARARE: RESEARCH & ADVOCACY UNIT and THE WOMENS’
TRUST.
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