life. This corroborates other work that suggests that women in general are disengaged from politics qua politics. To further examine this, we then tested these largely correlational findings by testing the hypotheses detailed earlier. Testing Social Capital The first set of hypotheses revolved around the theory that social capital should engender greater participation. Using a cut-off on the social capital score based on the mean and the standard deviation, with the highest possible score being six (6), we hypothesized that a high social capital score would be greater than four (4). Table 3: Effects of Hi and Lo Social Capital on participation Hi Social Capital (>=4) N=726 (24%) Access to Information Lo Social Capital (>4) N=2279 (76%) df t Sig (2-tailed) .93 1.06 3003 -2.435 0.015 Freedoms 1.13 .86 3003 7.165 0.000 Political Participation 2.01 1.88 3003 1.531 ns Agency .18 .04 3003 9.303 0.000 Support for Democracy 1.83 1.34 3003 10.023 0.000 Political Trust 3.25 1.94 3003 12.311 0.000 As seen in Table 3, apart from access to information, high social capital resulted in a range of significant differences. Those with high social capital were more likely to claim freedoms, political participation, agency, support for democracy, and political trust. This appeared to moderate the findings of the factor analysis, but there remained the finding in the first factor: that “middle class” was not related to social capital. Thus, we re-ran the analysis using residence, rural or urban, as the dependent variable, and included social capital as one of the independent variables. This new analysis is shown in Table 4. Rural women show significantly higher scores on every measure, including social capital, apart from access to information. Thus, it can be concluded that rural women have higher social capital than urban women, but are also much more participatory in socio-political life. Table 4: Comparison of Rural and Urban women and Social Capital Urban N=1065 (35.5%) Rural N=1938 (64.5%) df t Sig (2-tailed) Social Capital 2.60 2.71 3001 -11.530 0.000 Access to Information 1.98 0.50 3001 37.891 0.000 Freedoms 0.81 .99 3001 -5.360 0.000 Political Participation 1.67 2.05 3001 -5.029 0.000 Agency 0.04 .09 3001 -3.820 0.000 Support for Democracy 1.38 1.50 3001 -2.510 0.012 Political Trust 1.63 2.60 3001 -10.035 0.000 12