Computer Assisted Research

The crime stats shown between Grahamstown, Johannesburg, East London and Bloemfontein show some interesting results. Firstly the so called sleepy hollow of Grahamstown and its surrounding districts is one crime ridden place! Per capita Grahamstown has the highest incidents in all categories analysed of murder, rape, malicious damage to property and assault with intent. Although Grahamstown has the smallest population, you are more likely to be harmed than in a major city like Johannesburg. Bloemfontein, with the lowest statistics, is the safest place analysed.

Finding the data to be analysed was the trickiest aspect of the assignment. All the information was on government websites like saps.gov and statssa.gov but finding and accessing the information was not as straight forward. One difficulty that I encountered was the name changes of certain places, like Bloemfontein. Finding the populations of the areas was also not as simple to find. This is because all the areas except Johannesburg were coded. So I had to find what the areas were coded under to find out their populations, but luckily for me Galen had already figured this out and showed where to find it. Once I had found all the information, analysing it on Microsoft Excel was fairly easy. The programme is helpful because you only have to do the equation for per capita once and it does the rest of the stats for you. The only problem I found with the spreadsheet was how to label the cities on the pie chart. This was my first time working with Excel so I am unfamiliar with all the functions.

I am happy now that I can say that I have some knowledge of working with Excel and that it is not as daunting as it appears to be (even if I don’t know how to make labels -yet!) I have now discovered that it is a useful tool for analysing and sorting information.