Roper is proud to announce two new data providers: Afrobarometer, the leading source for cross-country comparative data from African countries, and the South African Reconciliation Barometer, the world’s longest-running public-opinion survey on national reconciliation. The addition of these survey series greatly enriches Roper’s global collections and builds on an little-known, but highly valuable older collection of African data.
New Data Providers
Afrobarometer was established in 1999 as a collaboration among Michigan State University (MSU), the Institute for Democracy in South Africa (Idasa), and the Center for Democratic Development (CDD-Ghana). The first round of surveys covered 12 nations. This initial effort laid the foundation for an ongoing project that has expanded to include 44 countries. Afrobarometer has not only become a core resource for understanding public attitudes and experiences across Africa, but also built an increasingly robust survey research infrastructure in the region through its network of field organizations and supporting institutions.
The South African Reconciliation Barometer is a long-running project of The Institute for Justice and Reconciliation (IJR), which was launched in 2000 in the wake of the public hearings of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Since 2003, the Barometer has tracked South Africans’ attitudes about political culture, racial reconciliation, social cohesion, and the legacy of apartheid. This survey series has served as a model for reconciliation measurement projects in other countries and provided support in the establishment of development of many such projects, including the ongoing Sri Lanka Barometer.
Afrobarometer and the South African Reconciliation Barometer, along with the Centre for Democratic Development in Africa (CDD) in Ghana, the Institute for Development Studies (IDS) in Nairobi, and Laws Africa, form the Data for Governance (D4G) Alliance, which seeks to build African capacity in the use of public opinion data for use in public policy processes.
Historical Data
These two major African data collection projects join three other major sources of African public opinion data at Roper: United States Information Agency (USIA) surveys; Knowledge, Attitudes, and Practices Surveys (KAPS); and the Human Services Research Council (HSRC) South African surveys. Each of these offer different geographical, topical, and temporal coverage of public opinion in Africa.
The USIA collection includes survey reports and datasets from the 1960s through 2000 in countries across Africa. Both single country surveys and multi-country surveys, like the World Survey series, are available. Topics covered include attitudes about foreign affairs, preferences among economic systems, perceptions of world powers, media consumption, and hopes and fears for the future. Several 1960s surveys focus on university student attitudes. Countries surveyed include Ghana, Nigeria, Cote d'Ivore, Senegal, Kenya, Uganda, Cameroon, Tanzania, Morocco, and Tunisia.
The KAPS surveys sponsored by the Population Council focused on marriage, family structure, family planning, mobility, and other population issues in a series of surveys around the world in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Roper’s KAPS collection includes surveys of women, men, and couples, in Sierra Leone, Kenya, Tunisia, Morocco, and Chad, as well as comparable surveys from Latin America, the Philippines, and Europe.
The Human Services Research Council is a statutory research agency that has been producing high-quality, policy-relevant research to support evidence-based decision-making for over 50 years. The HSRC surveys held at Roper Center cover issues related to socio-political change in South Africa during the 1980s and early 1990s.
Other African Data at Roper
In addition to these major collections, Roper holds a number of other historical surveys of unique value. A pair of Institute for International Social Research surveys conducted in Nigeria in 1962 asked the general public and Nigerian legislators about their hopes and fears for the country. Another 1962 poll, conducted on behalf of the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation (NBC), delved into media use in the country. A 1961 Marcomer-CNRS Hoffman survey compared youth attitudes in Niger; Senegal; Côte d'Ivoire; Upper Volta; and Benin.
Global polls provide another resource. Datasets from surveys of Black and white populations in South Africa from Gallup’s 1987 multicountry poll on AIDS have been converted to modern formats for users. Some such surveys targeted unusual populations: the 1990 Survey of School Psychology was fielded among school psychologists in 54 nations, including Ethiopia, Ghana, Niger, Nigeria, and Burkina Faso. Finally, Pew Global offers ongoing research into public attitudes around the world, allowing users to compare attitudes in African countries to those of other countries around the world.
Interested in Roper African data? Explore the data collection in our interactive world map. Some additional material may be unpublished or require format migration; contact data-services@ropercenter.org for more information.
