Chapter 13 The Impact of the CSG on Adolescent Risky Behaviours 101
Of the adolescents who offered a reason for joining a gang, approximately half reported that it was for money (most to buy basic necessities, but also to buy expensive things). Others joined a gang to ‘fit in’, to participate in gang activity, or to get money for drugs. There was little relationship observed, however, between CSG receipt and gang membership. In the PSM estimation, most estimated differences in gang membership between treatment subgroups and their comparisons (impacts) were close to zero. An exception was the comparison between adolescents who had received the CSG in the past and for which there was current CSG receipt in the household, with adolescents who had received the CSG in the past but there was currently no CSG in the household; those in households currently receiving the CSG had lower gang membership by six percentage points, although the result was not statistically significant. In the GPS estimation, the coefficient on the treatment measure (T, age at CSG receipt) was likewise close to zero (0.002) and the confidence bounds for the dose-response effects were relatively wide. Keeping in mind that only five per cent of adolescents reported participating in gangs, we conclude from this analysis that the CSG likely has little impact on adolescent gang membership.
early teenage/adolescent years) appeared to be at greater risk of poorer outcomes (schooling, work and risky behaviours), which we infer might be related to the fact that this group of youth is also less likely to be in households with current CSG receipt at the time of adolescence. This observed pattern of access to the CSG may be a policy implementation artefact, possibly relating to changes in the age of eligibility for the CSG over time, where some youth were not reached at an early age and also did not stay connected with the CSG through their teenage years. Further exploration of this pattern of CSG access showed that adolescents in Limpopo and Eastern Cape, followed by KwaZulu-Natal (the three poorest provinces), had significantly lower rates of current CSG receipt for adolescents who first began receiving the CSG between age 10 and 13 years. One important policy implication might be that greater efforts should be made to ensure continuous access to the CSG by households with eligible children through adolescence, so that the potential benefits of the CSG may be fully realised.
In general, the results of the analysis of CSG impacts on adolescents suggest the importance of both early receipt of the CSG by children and receipt of the CSG in the household at the time of adolescence. Early CSG receipt appears important in protecting adolescents against (or reducing their engagement in) the risky behaviours of sexual intercourse, alcohol use, drug use and criminal activity, and in reducing the number of sexual partners and early pregnancy. In addition, the findings suggested that household receipt of the CSG in the adolescents’ teenage years is important in reducing absences from school (particularly for males) as well as engagement in the above risky behaviours.
Finally, it is important to reiterate some of the limitations of this analysis. First, some of the fieldworker notes from the administration of the questionnaires suggested that some respondents became tense in sections (such as the disclosure of work and earnings) due to fear that their responses might jeopardise continued receipt of the CSG or that the data collection was part of increased enforcement efforts by SASSA. This might explain some of the discrepancies observed between household respondent and adolescent responses to several questions on the survey (such as the frequency of work outside the home by adolescents). A total of 1,504 (87%) of the 1,726 adolescents completed the confidential adolescent survey, which is a high response rate, but not all adolescents provided responses to all questions. A large majority of the non-responses were expected in logical skip patterns on the questionnaire, but there were also other missing values for observations that were handled in the analysis as if the nonresponses were at random. This is reflected in differing numbers of observations included in the analyses of the impacts of the CSG for the various outcomes.
Adolescents who first began receiving the CSG in the middle age range of childhood (not in the pre-school years or
For all of the propensity score matching (PSM) and generalise propensity score (GPS) analyses, after-matching
13.5 Concluding notes for analysis of CSG impacts on adolescents