Round 7: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. How often felt unsafe walking in neighbourhood Attend a community meeting Join others to raise an issue Member of voluntary association or community group How often careful what you say Like, dislike or not care as neighbours: people of different ethnicity These questions, and all the questions for the other measures, were turned into binary variables, and all scored in the positive direction. For example, the question on being careful what you say was scored positive if the response was in the direction of NOT being careful. This gave an overall score for the presence of social capital of six (6).6 Constructing measures of participation The other indices were derived as follows:        Lived Poverty (5) – how often have gone without the following: food, water, medical care, fuel for cooking, cash income;7 Access to information (4) – how often do you use the following: radio, television, newspaper, internet; Freedoms (2) – freedom to say what you think, freedom to join any political organization; Political Participation (3) – voted in last election, attended a campaign meeting or rally, and worked for a candidate or party; Agency (3) – contacted local government councillor, Member of Parliament (MP), or official of a government agency; Support for Democracy(2) – support for democracy and extent of democracy; Political Trust (8) – trust the following: president, parliament/national assembly, national electoral commission, local government council, ruling party, police, army, and courts of law.8 Hypotheses Given our overall research question – do women in high social capital environments engage actively in the general political life of Zimbabwe – it was appropriate to generate some testable hypotheses. These are described as follows:   Access to Information (Info) – Social Capital (SocCap) should be associated with greater interest in information; Freedom – Social Capital should be associated with greater perception of freedoms; 6 This had acceptable reliability: Cronbach’s Alpha – Social Capital (0.91). Lived Poverty was included in order to check whether possible differences between rural and urban respondents might be confounded by poverty since Zimbabweans have suffered severe effects from the economic decline in the past decade or so. 8 These all have strong reliability (Cronbach’s Alpha): Access to Information (0.95); Freedoms (0.99); Political Participation (0.82); Agency (0.77); Support for Democracy (0.93); Political Trust (0.99). 7 9