- Title
- Online Appendix: The Best and Worst Times of Life for South Africans: Evidence of universal reference standards in evaluations of personal well-being using Bernheim’s ACSA
- Creator
- Moller, Valerie, Roberts, Benjamin J
- Date
- 2018
- Type
- Article
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/10962/67024
- Identifier
- vital:29021
- Description
- Online appendix to the authors’ paper published in Social Indicators Research under the title: ‘The Best and Worst Times of Life for South Africans: Evidence of universal reference standards in evaluations of personal well‐being using Bernheim’s ACSA’. From the introduction: The Anamnestic Comparative Self‐Assessment (Bernheim’s ACSA), a measure of personal well‐being, was applied in the 10th annual round of the nationally representative South African Social Attitudes Survey (SASAS), a research infrastructure that has been administered by the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) since 2003. The target population for the survey was individuals aged 16 and over who live in South Africa. The multi‐stage sampling frame used by SASAS is based on census enumerator areas and data is weighted to the South African population using Statistics South Africa’s mid‐year population estimates as a benchmark. A total of 2’521 persons were interviewed in October and November 2012 by trained fieldworkers in their homes. Each interview was conducted in the respondent’s home language. ACSA was translated into the eleven official national languages. The SASAS 2012 study of ACSA follows on two earlier South African studies conducted in the Eastern Cape Province: a small pilot study conducted in 2005/6, followed by a larger representative community survey with some 1’000 respondents in 2007. ACSA uses a self‐anchoring scale. SASAS 2012 survey respondents were asked to think, first of their best period in life, and then of their worst period in life. These two periods represent the anchors of an 11‐ point scale running from ‐5 over a mid‐point (0), to +5. Text placed above the negative ‐5 anchor of the scale read: ‘As bad as the WORST period in my life’; text above the positive +5 anchor read: ‘As good as the BEST period in my life’. The respondents were asked to rate their present well‐being relative to these two periods on the scale. Their descriptions of these two extreme periods were recorded verbatim at the time of the interview. Later they were classified by domain in life based on the guidelines for the standard multiple‐choice format provided for recording ACSA anchors. This classification system is recommended by the ACSA scales’ initiator, Jan Bernheim and his colleagues. This online appendix to our Social Indicators Research article (‘The best and worst times of life for South Africans: Evidence of universal reference standards in evaluations of personal well‐being using Bernheim’s ACSA’) reports in greater detail the substantive contents of the survey responses to the ACSA anchoring process. The anchors of the ACSA scale serve as the reference standards for evaluating one’s life. Importantly, our 2012 SASAS survey respondents were invited to make explicit their choice of reference standards when reviewing their lives. This data offers a unique opportunity to gain rich insights into what matters for South Africans when they think about their quality of life and personal well‐being.
- Format
- 33 pages
- Publisher
- Rhodes University
- Language
- English
- Relation
- Moller, V. & Roberts, B.J. (2018). Appendix: The Best and Worst Times of Life for South Africans: Evidence of universal reference standards in evaluations of personal well-being using Bernheim’s ACSA. Original article in Social Indicators Research.
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| Thumbnail | File | Description | Size | Format | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| View Details | SOURCE1 | ACSA 2018 Online Appendix 5 Final 31 August 2018 | 337 KB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details |