Marginalisation: distilling the results

Age, education, race and sex are all key analytical devises to understand the scale of marginalisation and how it affects sectors of society. With ‘OK’ absorbing so many respondents, it is the largest single category in most demographic analysis (which is why we later use factor analysis and correspondence mapping to find deeper relationships in the data), so our focus will unavoidably be drawn to categories to either side of the bulky mid-range.

Marginalisation by age (2011)

Marginalisation by age Marginalisation by education Marginalisation by race Marginalisation by sex

Age

Among respondents aged 16-19 years of age, 2,3% were ‘marginalised’, with 7,1% ‘at risk’.

In the 65+ category, we find 3% are ‘marginalised’, with another 5,4% being ‘at risk’.

21,5% of 16-19 year-old respondents were ‘fine’, the highest of any age cohort (including socio-economic variables such as assets, income and so on) that do not reflect actual state of mind.

While young people and those at retirement age and above (65+) scored poorly on the Quality of Llife index, this situation is reversed on the marginalisation index.

Education

The education variable strongly correlates with marginalisation - echoing 2009 findings.

The educational restraints inflicted by the racist ‘Bantu education’ under apartheid seem to lock africans into low quality of life and high marginalisation. But it does so for all citizens with low or no education; and for a cityregion that seeks to compete with the best in the world, develop a knowledge economy and run smart cities, the need to raise educational standards cannot be over emphasised.

Among respondents with no education, over a quarter (26,1%) are either ‘marginalised’ or ‘at risk’, and just 8,6% are fine – the latter is three times lower than those with a post-matric qualification.

Race

It is not surprising to find that just 0,8% of white respondents were ‘marginalised’, rising to 2,4% among indians, who perform well in quality of life scores, and feature strongly in the ‘fine’ category here. Remembering that apartheid impacted african communities negatively, it is the scale of that long-lasting impact that shapes current discourse – because, while 17% of Africans are ‘fine’ in this marginalisation index, that is 5% lower than indians and coloureds and 10% lower than whites. worse, at the negative end of the scale, 5,2% of african respondents were ‘marginalised’ – true of 1,8% of indians, 1,4% of coloureds and, 0,8% of whites.

Combining ‘marginalised’ with ‘at risk’, the contrast is clear. 13,6% of africans fall into the ‘at risk’ and ‘marginalised’ categories, compared with 2,2% of whites.

Sex

There is no difference (beyond 0,1%) between men and women in the ‘OK’ category. But more men (19,2%) than women (18,2%) are doing ‘fine’ – and more women (4,6%) than men (3,9%) are marginalised. if we take ‘at risk’ and ‘marginalised’ together, they comprise 10,7% of men and 11,8% of women.

State of Gauteng City Region

Marginalisation by age (2011)

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The vast majority of respondents are ‘fine’ or ‘OK’ – 89% of the sample fall into these categories.

Age

Education

Race

Sex