South Africa’s Emergent “Social Indicators Movement”

Abstract

An introduction to a special journal issue on South African quality of life (see abstracts of related articles) reveals that an absence of credible social indicators was one element of the apartheid area. Mistrust in statistics has been replaced with a government reliance on social indicators as guides for social policy. However, temporary disillusionment may be expected, because time is required before social change exhibits reliable social accounts. Nonetheless, social indicators are valuable tools for assessing development potentials of the new democracy, & the emerging South African movement is focusing on the comprehensiveness, quality, & comparability of data. The contributors represent a wide range of social science disciplines &, taken together, offer a fairly comprehensive picture of quality-of-life trends in South Africa in the mid-1990s while stressing the enormity of the challenge to transform South Africa into the ideal society envisioned by its leaders. 11 References. J. Lindroth