Survey research is not a novel technology in South Africa, since both academic and commercial interests employ surveys on a regular basis. For instance, South Africa has been included in each of the waves of the World Values Surveys (although as with many of the surveys in that series, the representativeness of especially the earlier samples is extremely limited). Nonetheless, survey researchers in South Africa face some formidable obstacles. In this chapter, we discuss the ways in which we have overcome these obstacles.

Our objectives in the survey upon which we rely in this book were (a) to use our survey data to draw inferences about the attributes (univariate and multivariate) of the entire South African population; (b) to be able to analyze differences across the major racial/ethnic/linguistic groups in South Africa with some degree of precision; and (c) to assess change in South African political culture, even if over a fairly short period of time. With these goals in mind, this chapter presents the details of our research design. In addition, we address a variety of threats to the validity and reliability of the data we collected in the survey.