SOCIOLOLINGUISTIC SURVEYS - Centre for Language Studies

live near schools where they teach, it was difficult to get teachers. The population,
therefore, does not feature as many teachers as the researchers would have liked.
The area­specific problem experienced in Nsanje and Chikwawa was the alarmingly high
temperatures. These high temperatures induced fatigue in the researchers who were not
used to hot climate conditions.
The third problem had to do with the politics of the area in which the survey was
conducted. Nsanje and Chikwawwa districts have all their parliamentary constitutients
(except one) taken by the ruling UDF party. The single seat in the hands of the
opposition belongs to the leader of the opposition, who also happens to be the President
of the Malawi Congress Party (MCP). In these two districts, there is political tension
between the two rival parties. In some cases this tension does lead to violence. The
research team was on more than one occasion mistakenly identified as an MCP group.
The mistaken identity was due to the fact that the lowly educated local people could not
tell the difference between the MCP flag and the GTZ/Malawi logo which was on all the
vehicles the research team used. To the local people, the flags resembled the old Malawi
Congress Party flag. As a result, it used to take the research team some time to educate
the local UDF faithfuls about the research teams’ non­invlovemement in MCP or political
issues as awhole. Such problems were met at Tengani and Marka.
Due to the problems mentioned above, it was impossible to reach the target of
interviewing 1000 respondents. Instead 817 subjects were interviewed.
6.4.6 SOME DEMOGRAPHIC CHARACTERISTICS OF THE RESPONDENTS
Areas of interest here are sex, age, and levels of education of the categories of the
respondents. Of the 817 respondents, 289(35.4%) were parents/guardians; 16 (2.0%)
were teachers; 409 (50.1%) were pupils, whilst 103 (12.6%) were in the ‘other’ category.
The distribution of the respondents per district was as follows: 328 respondents (40.1%)
for Chikwawa and 489 respondents (59.9%) for Nsanje. In terms of age, the age range
15­19 years constituted the larget group with 222 respondents (27.2%); followed by the
10­14 years age group with 190 respondents (23.3%). Table 80 captures the age
statistics.
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