Skip to main navigation menu Skip to main content Skip to site footer

Articles

CJOC: Vol. 6 No.1, June 2019

Exploring Citizens' Constitution Readability Profile in Selected Anglophone African Countries

  • William Kodom Gyasi & Julius Nyerere Tettey
Submitted
August 27, 2019
Published
2019-06-29

Abstract

A country's constitution describes the basic principles of the state, structures, and processes of government as well as fundamental rights of citizens. All of these make imperative the ability of the citizens to read and understand the document. This paper evaluates the readability profile of citizens of the English speaking African countries concerning their constitution. A descriptive research design was adopted while the stratified random sampling was implemented to select the chapters of the constitutions for analysis. The SMOG and FOG indexes were used to compute the readability scores. Measures of central tendencies, one-sample T-test, and one-way analysis of variance, with bootstrapping, were carried out with the results showing that the citizens found it difficult reading their constitutions when compared to the standard scores for public documents.