The purpose of this study was to determine the prevalence of known etiological factors in mildly mentally handicapped students across minority and nonminority groups and to examine the similarities of these patterns. A comparison of early diagnoses was also made. The total population of all children labeled Educable Mentally Handicapped (EMH) and attending regular elementary schools within one of the largest districts in the southwest served as the sample for the present study. There were 128 children, 64 minorities and 64 nonminorities. The student records were reviewed for data regarding etiological factors, previous diagnoses and early medical factors. A pilot study which involved administering a questionnaire to a sample to twenty-eight social workers was conducted to ascertain the validity of obtained data. Eight specific hypotheses were addressed. A Chi-Square analysis yielded information about the patterns of category similarities (congenital, prenatal, perinatal, postnatal and familial), between two groups as well as the presence of professional diagnosis. A set of five factorial analysis of variance were performed to examine the impact of age, number of symptoms, presence of professional diagnosis and length of hospital stay on IQ scores of children in both groups. A discriminant function analysis was performed to determine the discriminatory power of four variables (IQ, length of hospital stay, number of symptoms and presence of professional diagnosis). The prevalence of perinatal and postnatal symptoms and diagnoses occurred with high frequency for both groups. Congenital factors occurred significantly more for the nonminority group. The findings indicated that there were no significant differences across minority and nonminority groups in terms of intellectual functioning due to the impact of the four previously mentioned variables. Consistent with the ANOVA results, the information obtained from the discriminant function analysis suggests similarity of the two groups in terms of the four variables. The results were discussed in relation to the utility of early etiological information and the importance of such research. The implications of such findings for placement of children in general in these classes or for the children from minority groups in particular, were emphasized.

No description available.

M.A. / The recent social and political changes that have taken place in South Africa, particularly the integration of the universities, makes this an ideal setting for the study of students’ attitudes and perceptions of their own and other cultural groups. A limitation of existing attitude studies in South Africa and abroad is that these studies have focussed minimally on identifying cultural perceptual processes that underlie intergroup attitudes. In addition, these studies tend to focus mainly on the attitudes of single ethno-cultural groups towards one or a few specific ethnic target groups. The variation of group attitudes of each other across diverse cultural orientation groups has thus mostly been neglected. In order to address such problems, this study aimed at examining cultural group attitudes and core value-orientations (Individualism and Collectivism) amongst 1st and 2nd year psychology volunteer students at RAU. More specifically, this study aimed at determining the variation of group attitudes and value-orientations in terms of a number of independent variables, and the correlation between group attitudes and core value-orientations. The study employed a questionnaire survey with a sample of 541 1st and 2nd year psychology volunteer students at RAU. The sample included male and female students from the broad cultural orientation groups (Western, African, Middle-Eastern (Muslim) and Indian/Asian cultural orientation groups), and the three main language groups (English, Afrikaans and African languages), as well as resident students and day-students from various faculties and academic years of study. The assessment instruments comprised of an Individualism and Collectivism Likert Scale (IS/CS) (Gudykunst, 1995), designed to measure generalised core value-orientations, and a Semantic Differential Scale (SDS) (Nieuwoudt, 1973), designed to measure attitudes towards five broad cultural orientation groups, namely: Western-Afrikaans, Western-English, Indian/Asian, Middle-Eastern (Muslim) and Indigenous African groups. The independent variables included in the analyses of the data were: gender, resident vs. day-students (intimacy and frequency of contact variable), cultural group membership/identity, and first language. The construct validity and the internal reliability of the I/CS and SDS were investigated by means of principal axis factor analysis and Cronbach alpha reliability coefficients. Independent t-tests were used to identify statistically significant differences between the IS/CS and SDS scores of the male and female respondents and the resident students and day-students. ANOVA and subsequent Scheffé or Dunnett T3 post-hoc tests were used to identify the group similarities and differences in the scores for the five cultural-identity groups and the three language groups. Finally, Pearsons’ product-moment correlations were used to identify significant correlations between the IS/CS and SDS scores. Important findings were the following: • Females indicated significantly stronger Individualism and Collectivism scores than males. • Day-students indicated significantly stronger Collectivism scores than resident students. • Statistically significant differences were identified in the IS/CS scores of the five cultural-identity groups and the three language groups. • Males and females differed significantly from one another in terms of their perceptions of Indian/Asian cultural groups. • Resident students and day-students differed significantly from one another in terms of their perceptions of Western-Afrikaans and African cultural groups. • The five cultural-orientation groups and the three language groups differed significantly from one another in terms of their perceptions of Western-Afrikaans, Western-English and African cultural groups. • Significant correlations for the Collectivism scores and the SDS scores for the perceptions of the Western-English, Indian/Asian, Middle-Eastern and African cultures were identified. These correlations were however extremely low, indicating that conducting a regression analysis of the SDS attitude scores in terms of the IS/CS scores was not feasible. Theoretical implications were discussed and recommendations were made for future research in this field.

M.Cur

“Ocean Bombay” is a social history of a colonial city of itinerants. Between 1839 and 1937 the actions of the British Indian colonial state and itinerancy upon one another shaped both the borders of the newly independent nations in 1947 and the changing notions of community and human relationship with space in the South Asian subcontinent. This dissertation charts the story of that development by studying itinerant groups staking their belonging to communities and space in colonial, port Bombay: Sidi shipworkers, Bombay-Aden merchants, Irani cafe owners, nomadic groups, publishers, filmmakers, and actresses. In doing so I intervene in the urban historiography of the city by writing about Bombay’s forgotten transoceanic past as a port city straddling the transformation of the subcontinent from colonial state to nation-state. Further, I rethink the concepts of “community” and border-making as used in South Asian historical and theoretical thinking by examining them through the lens of itinerancy and gender. “Ocean Bombay” thus locates Bombay society at the intersection of several oceanic geographies, through the study of an archive built from fragments and interviews collected across India, the United Kingdom, and Iran.

A thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Arts University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts / The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of social support for African women labouring aione in a Westernized hospital setting. Two high stress groups of first-time mothers, were studied; a mildly hypertensive group and a teenage group. the results indicated support to be moderately effective in both groups. Factors such as the cultural background, the apartheid system, social influences and the environment in which the mothers live may have impacted on the effectiveness of the support. / AC 2018

Since bias threatens the validity of a study, it should be avoided where possible. Across all phases of a research project, bias could be introduced, and in most situations the researcher has reasonable control over processes that may be the source of bias. However, within a quantitative research context in social sciences, where the opinions, attitudes and intentions of people are often sought, response styles patterns due to cultural background, for example, are not within the control of the researcher. Typical response style patterns include acquiescence bias, a tendency to be agreeable to statements, which could be more prevalent in certain cultural groups than other. Another response style pattern is extremity ratings, where respondents tend to avoid the middle categories and mark the scale extremes. When practitioners sample respondents from different cultural groups, it is difficult, and depending on the research design, sometimes impossible to know whether significant differences are an artefact of substantive differences, or of differences in response styles. Adjusting scores for bias has a significant effect on the interpretation of research findings. To correct for bias, the method most commonly used to adjust scores within each cultural group is standardisation. In this research, SIMNORM, a target distribution estimation approach was used for the simultaneous estimation of a class of non-linear transformation functions that transform the composite scores within each cultural group to a standard normal distribution. SIMNORM was found to perform better than standardisation to obtain equivalence across cultural groups when composite scores are used. In addition, SIMITNORM, an item normalisation approach was developed, which is a simultaneous non-linear transformation of item scores to a standard normal target distribution. The results of seven nested SIMITNORM models were compared to raw item scores and standardised scores, using a multi-group confirmatory factor analysis approach, a method that is suitable to test for construct equivalence, metric equivalence and scalar equivalence. SIMITNORM had significant advantages over standardisation as an approach to obtain equivalence over items in a set of data where bias is present.

by Wan Yiu Ming, Wong Kwai Sang, Zhao Bin. / Thesis (M.B.A.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1995. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 40-44). / ABSTRACT --- p.ii / TABLE OF CONTENT --- p.iii / LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS --- p.v / LIST OF TABLES --- p.vi / PREFACE --- p.vii / Chapter CHAPTER 1 --- INTRODUCTION --- p.1 / Recent Economic Success In China --- p.1 / Cross-cultural Management Challenges in China --- p.3 / Chapter CHAPTER II --- BACKGROUND OF CULTURE --- p.5 / Definition of Culture --- p.6 / Definition of National Culture --- p.8 / Dimensions of Cultural Differences --- p.8 / Managerial Implications of the Cultural Dimensions --- p.11 / Chapter CHAPTER III --- GEERT HOFSTEDE'S RESEARCH ON CULTURE --- p.12 / Hofstede's Five Dimensions of National Culture --- p.12 / Hofstede's Research on Chinese Societies --- p.17 / Chapter CHAPTER IV --- CULTURAL DIFFERENCES WITHIN SAME SOCIETY --- p.20 / Convergence-divergence Approach --- p.21 / SUBCULTURAL APPROACH --- p.25 / Chapter CHAPTER V --- OUR SUGGESTED CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK --- p.27 / Culture Shaping Factors --- p.28 / What are the Main Issues? --- p.31 / Culture Distance and Cross-culture Management --- p.32 / Chapter CHAPTER VI --- IMPLICATIONS OF THE PROPOSED FRAMEWORK TO CROSS- CULTURAL MANAGEMENT ISSUES IN CHINA --- p.34 / Expatriate Issues --- p.34 / Cross-cultural Training Issues --- p.35 / Regional Cultural Difference Within Mainland China --- p.36 / Chapter CHAPTER VII --- CONCLUSION --- p.38 / BIBLIOGRAPHY --- p.40

My dissertation explores people’s responses to cultural crossing, exploring when and why it is admired or admonished. One form of crossing is cultural accommodation, which occurs when a recently arrived foreign visitor behaves like a local, adhering to host-country norms of behavior rather than those of his/her heritage country. The second is cultural borrowing, which occurs when ideas from multiple cultural traditions are integrated into a product, performance or activity. I propose that people’s background beliefs about cultural differences (i.e., diversity ideologies) influence their evaluations of the actions of other people who cross cultures, as well as their own decisions to cross cultures. My studies consider two well-studied diversity ideologies—colorblindness and multiculturalism. In addition, I also consider polyculturalism, a more novel ideology that, like multiculturalism, celebrates cultural differences. However, polyculturalism differs in that it embraces cultural change. I develop novel methods for empirically distinguishing consequences of the mindset of polyculturalism as opposed to classical multiculturalism. In Chapter 1, I explore how diversity ideologies affect people’s acceptance of foreign visitors’ accommodation to the local culture. Multiculturalism, which holds cultural traditions to be separate legacies that should be preserved, was associated with negative evaluations of high accommodation. When polyculturalism (vs. multiculturalism) was experimentally primed, high accommodation was evaluated more positively. Further, I examine the underlying effects of diversity ideology on evaluations by focusing on trust judgments and find that multiculturalists’ distrust of high accommodators involves judgments of low ability and of identity contamination. In Chapter 2, I develop the argument that diversity ideologies guide people’s first-person decisions about whether to accommodate when entering a new cultural context. Polyculturalism facilitated cultural accommodation and longer-term cultural adjustment by reducing concerns about contamination of heritage identity, whereas colorblindness and multiculturalism had no consistent effects. In Chapter 3, I theorize and demonstrate that diversity ideologies also affect how people draw upon knowledge from foreign cultures in their problem-solving. Polyculturalism encouraged participants’ inclusion of foreign ideas when solving problems, which enhanced their creativity. However, colorblindness, which views ethnicity/culture as a mirage that is best ignored, inhibited participants’ incorporation of foreign ideas, thereby reducing creativity. No effect was found for multiculturalism. Taken together, the chapters of my dissertation contribute to a more nuanced understanding of cultural crossing: when people do it, and when people admire or admonish others for doing so. Also, these empirical findings advance research on polyculturalism and spark future research questions.

Errata inserted facing t. p. Bibliography: leaves 406-457. A comparative investigation of language usage and language attitudes in relation to Filipino/Tagalog, Philippine languages other than Tagalog and English among senior high school students and their parents in two countries, the Philippines and Australia. The study provides an historical overview of the development of national language policies in Australia and in the Philippines, focussing on the way in which multiculturalism in Australia influenced language policies, and on the reasons for the adoption of the Bilingual Education Program in the Philippines.