Soul City is evaluated by external agencies and for the fourth series there was an international advisory board set up which met twice, before and during the evaluation to guide the direction of the evaluation. Some advisory panel members gave input at various points throughout the course of the evaluation. The evaluation was also multifaceted and used extensive triangulation to gain insight into the reception and impact of Soul City at the various levels of society.

Soul City evaluations strive to look at change and then to look at whether Soul City is associated with that change - this of course does not preclude other inputs into that change. However, the consistency of change associated with Soul City and the dose response relationships as well as the qualitative research outlining numerous stories of change directly attributed to Soul City strongly suggests that the impact can be measured and is positive over a range of aspects of behaviour change.

The statistic in paragraph one [click here for Coulson]: 7% read newspapers seems very low. In our series 5 evaluation in a study of 3500 people in South Africa 16 years and over 42% had seen at least one of the three booklets distributed through the newspaper.