Streetism is a world-wide, socio-economic problem and vulnerable children continue to migrate to the streets due to personal and contextual reasons. Attempts have been made to prevent streetism however; these interventions tend to ignore the need to recognise and incorporate the views of street children. In other words, current interventions are based on the views of adults (adultist views) working in the field of social work and psychology excepting the views of street children themselves. This is where this study is located. The study sought to explore the views of street children on how streetism can be prevented. This study was a qualitative, phenomenological study in which semi-structured focus group interviews were used as data collection methods. Twenty street children volunteered to participate in this study. All of the children fell into the category of children on the streets who still had connections with their parents and guardians. Their ages ranged between 10 and 16, and were all attending school. The following themes emerged from the data: families should be strengthened to prevent streetism, sound peer support can prevent streetism, schools can be used to prevent streetism, having access to social services can prevent streetism, churches can prevent streetism, a supportive community can prevent streetism and access to government services can prevent streetism. These findings provide insight into how, according to the views of street children, streetism can be prevented. The findings add to theory and have implications for practice. / MEd (Educational Psychology), North-West University, Vaal Triangle Campus, 2014

Streetism is a world-wide, socio-economic problem and vulnerable children continue to migrate to the streets due to personal and contextual reasons. Attempts have been made to prevent streetism however; these interventions tend to ignore the need to recognise and incorporate the views of street children. In other words, current interventions are based on the views of adults (adultist views) working in the field of social work and psychology excepting the views of street children themselves. This is where this study is located. The study sought to explore the views of street children on how streetism can be prevented. This study was a qualitative, phenomenological study in which semi-structured focus group interviews were used as data collection methods. Twenty street children volunteered to participate in this study. All of the children fell into the category of children on the streets who still had connections with their parents and guardians. Their ages ranged between 10 and 16, and were all attending school. The following themes emerged from the data: families should be strengthened to prevent streetism, sound peer support can prevent streetism, schools can be used to prevent streetism, having access to social services can prevent streetism, churches can prevent streetism, a supportive community can prevent streetism and access to government services can prevent streetism. These findings provide insight into how, according to the views of street children, streetism can be prevented. The findings add to theory and have implications for practice. / MEd (Educational Psychology), North-West University, Vaal Triangle Campus, 2014

The purpose of this study was to document, by means of a literature review and empirical research, the phenomenon of resilience among adolescents with learning difficulties (LD). My study was motivated by a gap in current literature. Although there are some South African studies that explore the personal antecedents of resilience in youth with LD, there were almost no studies explaining what interpersonal antecedents might contribute to resilience. The aim of the empirical study was to investigate the phenomenon of resilience among adolescent learners coping with LD. This was done by conducting phenomenological research with ten learners who have LD and attend a school for learners with special learning needs. The findings of the study are in accordance with previous studies that suggest that resilience is encouraged by dynamic processes that are both interpersonal and intrapersonal. This study makes a contribution to theory in that it suggests that resilience among adolescent learners with LD is also encouraged by their home environment and the positive relationship with siblings that might be brought on by parents treating all their children impartially. This has not been noted in previous studies. This study also raises questions about whether inclusion of all learners in mainstream schools are beneficial to learners with LD. Because my study identified interpersonal processes (unconditional acceptance, safe spaces, championship and pedagogical expertise) that promoted resilience among those participants who took part in my study, my study contributes to what was understood about the process of resilience in learners with LD and in so doing contributes to practice in that guidelines could be drafted for Life Orientation teachers based on the findings of this study. These guidelines can enable dedicated teachers to adapt their classroom environment so that a learner with LD can benefit. / Thesis (M.Ed.)--North-West University, Vaal Triangle Campus, 2009.

The purpose of this study was to document, by means of a literature review and empirical research, the phenomenon of resilience among adolescents with learning difficulties (LD). My study was motivated by a gap in current literature. Although there are some South African studies that explore the personal antecedents of resilience in youth with LD, there were almost no studies explaining what interpersonal antecedents might contribute to resilience. The aim of the empirical study was to investigate the phenomenon of resilience among adolescent learners coping with LD. This was done by conducting phenomenological research with ten learners who have LD and attend a school for learners with special learning needs. The findings of the study are in accordance with previous studies that suggest that resilience is encouraged by dynamic processes that are both interpersonal and intrapersonal. This study makes a contribution to theory in that it suggests that resilience among adolescent learners with LD is also encouraged by their home environment and the positive relationship with siblings that might be brought on by parents treating all their children impartially. This has not been noted in previous studies. This study also raises questions about whether inclusion of all learners in mainstream schools are beneficial to learners with LD. Because my study identified interpersonal processes (unconditional acceptance, safe spaces, championship and pedagogical expertise) that promoted resilience among those participants who took part in my study, my study contributes to what was understood about the process of resilience in learners with LD and in so doing contributes to practice in that guidelines could be drafted for Life Orientation teachers based on the findings of this study. These guidelines can enable dedicated teachers to adapt their classroom environment so that a learner with LD can benefit. / Thesis (M.Ed.)--North-West University, Vaal Triangle Campus, 2009.

The chief focus of this study was on unearthing the antecedents of resilience in children on the street and street children in institutional care. This study was motivated by the desire to understand what made some street children function resiliently in spite of the individual, familial, environmental and wider community risk process that threaten resilience. I was alerted to the participants' resilience by the unexpected positive findings after they completed the Child and Youth Resilience Measure (CYRM). Twenty street children volunteered to take part in this study. Of the 20 participants who took part in this study, 14 were children on the street who still had contact with families and six resided at a shelter with no regular contact with their families. This was a mixed methods exploratory study in which I employed the Child and Youth resilience Measure (CYRM) to collect quantitative data from all the participants, and qualitative data via individual interviews and a focus group interview. I used the interviews to provide a deeper understanding of the antecedents of resilience identified in the CYRM. My findings from this study documented individual and environmental resilience processes that enabled the participants to function resiliently despite the harshness of streetism. Many of the resilience -promoting resources unearthed have not been linked to street children and previous studies on resilient street children have not noted all inter- and intrapersonal resources identified by the street children in my study. These resources included individual resources such as role models, assertiveness, regulating themselves socially, coping mechanisms, community - based resources such as access to education as well as cultural resources which include cultural groundedness and religion. These findings show that some street children are resilient and that they develop coping mechanisms reminiscent of hidden resilience that enable them to cope with streetism. The findings of this study have implications for practice especially asset-focused approaches to supporting street children. / Thesis (Ph.D. (Education))--North-West University, Vaal Triangle Campus, 2009.

The purpose of this study was to document, by means of a literature review and empirical research, the phenomenon of resilience among adolescents with learning difficulties (LD). My study was motivated by a gap in current literature. Although there are some South African studies that explore the personal antecedents of resilience in youth with LD, there were almost no studies explaining what interpersonal antecedents might contribute to resilience. The aim of the empirical study was to investigate the phenomenon of resilience among adolescent learners coping with LD. This was done by conducting phenomenological research with ten learners who have LD and attend a school for learners with special learning needs. The findings of the study are in accordance with previous studies that suggest that resilience is encouraged by dynamic processes that are both interpersonal and intrapersonal. This study makes a contribution to theory in that it suggests that resilience among adolescent learners with LD is also encouraged by their home environment and the positive relationship with siblings that might be brought on by parents treating all their children impartially. This has not been noted in previous studies. This study also raises questions about whether inclusion of all learners in mainstream schools are beneficial to learners with LD. Because my study identified interpersonal processes (unconditional acceptance, safe spaces, championship and pedagogical expertise) that promoted resilience among those participants who took part in my study, my study contributes to what was understood about the process of resilience in learners with LD and in so doing contributes to practice in that guidelines could be drafted for Life Orientation teachers based on the findings of this study. These guidelines can enable dedicated teachers to adapt their classroom environment so that a learner with LD can benefit. / Thesis (M.Ed.)--North-West University, Vaal Triangle Campus, 2009.

The chief focus of this study was on unearthing the antecedents of resilience in children on the street and street children in institutional care. This study was motivated by the desire to understand what made some street children function resiliently in spite of the individual, familial, environmental and wider community risk process that threaten resilience. I was alerted to the participants' resilience by the unexpected positive findings after they completed the Child and Youth Resilience Measure (CYRM). Twenty street children volunteered to take part in this study. Of the 20 participants who took part in this study, 14 were children on the street who still had contact with families and six resided at a shelter with no regular contact with their families. This was a mixed methods exploratory study in which I employed the Child and Youth resilience Measure (CYRM) to collect quantitative data from all the participants, and qualitative data via individual interviews and a focus group interview. I used the interviews to provide a deeper understanding of the antecedents of resilience identified in the CYRM. My findings from this study documented individual and environmental resilience processes that enabled the participants to function resiliently despite the harshness of streetism. Many of the resilience -promoting resources unearthed have not been linked to street children and previous studies on resilient street children have not noted all inter- and intrapersonal resources identified by the street children in my study. These resources included individual resources such as role models, assertiveness, regulating themselves socially, coping mechanisms, community - based resources such as access to education as well as cultural resources which include cultural groundedness and religion. These findings show that some street children are resilient and that they develop coping mechanisms reminiscent of hidden resilience that enable them to cope with streetism. The findings of this study have implications for practice especially asset-focused approaches to supporting street children. / Thesis (Ph.D. (Education))--North-West University, Vaal Triangle Campus, 2009.

In insurance risk theory, the surplus of an insurance company is modelled to monitor and quantify its risks. With the outgo of claims and inflow of premiums, the insurer needs to determine what financial portfolio ensures the soundness of the company’s future while satisfying the shareholders’ interests. It is usually assumed that the net profit condition (i.e. the expectation of the process is positive) is satisfied, which then implies that this process would drift towards infinity. To correct this unrealistic behaviour, the surplus process was modified to include the payout of dividends until the time of ruin. Under this more realistic surplus process, a topic of growing interest is determining which dividend strategy is optimal, where optimality is in the sense of maximizing the expected present value of dividend payments. This problem dates back to the work of Bruno De Finetti (1957) where it was shown that if the surplus process is modelled as a random walk with ± 1 step sizes, the optimal dividend payment strategy is a barrier strategy. Such a strategy pays as dividends any excess of the surplus above some threshold. Since then, other examples where a barrier strategy is optimal include the Brownian motion model (Gerber and Shiu (2004)) and the compound Poisson process model with exponential claims (Gerber and Shiu (2006)). In this thesis, we focus on the optimality of a barrier strategy in the more general Lévy risk models. The risk process will be formulated as a spectrally negative Lévy process, a continuous-time stochastic process with stationary increments which provides an extension of the classical Cramér-Lundberg model. This includes the Brownian and the compound Poisson risk processes as special cases. In this setting, results are expressed in terms of “scale functions”, a family of functions known only through their Laplace transform. In Loeffen (2008), we can find a sufficient condition on the jump distribution of the process for a barrier strategy to be optimal. This condition was then improved upon by Loeffen and Renaud (2010) while considering a more general control problem. The first chapter provides a brief review of theory of spectrally negative Lévy processes and scale functions. In chapter 2, we define the optimal dividends problem and provide existing results in the literature. When the surplus process is given by the Cramér-Lundberg process with a Brownian motion component, we provide a sufficient condition on the parameters of this process for the optimality of a dividend barrier strategy. Chapter 3 focuses on the case when the claims distribution is given by a univariate mixture of Erlang distributions with a common scale parameter. Analytical results for the Value-at-Risk and Tail-Value-at-Risk, and the Euler risk contribution to the Conditional Tail Expectation are provided. Additionally, we give some results for the scale function and the optimal dividends problem. In the final chapter, we propose an expectation maximization (EM) algorithm similar to that in Lee and Lin (2009) for fitting the univariate distribution to data. This algorithm is implemented and numerical results on the goodness of fit to sample data and on the optimal dividends problem are presented.

In insurance risk theory, the surplus of an insurance company is modelled to monitor and quantify its risks. With the outgo of claims and inflow of premiums, the insurer needs to determine what financial portfolio ensures the soundness of the company’s future while satisfying the shareholders’ interests. It is usually assumed that the net profit condition (i.e. the expectation of the process is positive) is satisfied, which then implies that this process would drift towards infinity. To correct this unrealistic behaviour, the surplus process was modified to include the payout of dividends until the time of ruin. Under this more realistic surplus process, a topic of growing interest is determining which dividend strategy is optimal, where optimality is in the sense of maximizing the expected present value of dividend payments. This problem dates back to the work of Bruno De Finetti (1957) where it was shown that if the surplus process is modelled as a random walk with ± 1 step sizes, the optimal dividend payment strategy is a barrier strategy. Such a strategy pays as dividends any excess of the surplus above some threshold. Since then, other examples where a barrier strategy is optimal include the Brownian motion model (Gerber and Shiu (2004)) and the compound Poisson process model with exponential claims (Gerber and Shiu (2006)). In this thesis, we focus on the optimality of a barrier strategy in the more general Lévy risk models. The risk process will be formulated as a spectrally negative Lévy process, a continuous-time stochastic process with stationary increments which provides an extension of the classical Cramér-Lundberg model. This includes the Brownian and the compound Poisson risk processes as special cases. In this setting, results are expressed in terms of “scale functions”, a family of functions known only through their Laplace transform. In Loeffen (2008), we can find a sufficient condition on the jump distribution of the process for a barrier strategy to be optimal. This condition was then improved upon by Loeffen and Renaud (2010) while considering a more general control problem. The first chapter provides a brief review of theory of spectrally negative Lévy processes and scale functions. In chapter 2, we define the optimal dividends problem and provide existing results in the literature. When the surplus process is given by the Cramér-Lundberg process with a Brownian motion component, we provide a sufficient condition on the parameters of this process for the optimality of a dividend barrier strategy. Chapter 3 focuses on the case when the claims distribution is given by a univariate mixture of Erlang distributions with a common scale parameter. Analytical results for the Value-at-Risk and Tail-Value-at-Risk, and the Euler risk contribution to the Conditional Tail Expectation are provided. Additionally, we give some results for the scale function and the optimal dividends problem. In the final chapter, we propose an expectation maximization (EM) algorithm similar to that in Lee and Lin (2009) for fitting the univariate distribution to data. This algorithm is implemented and numerical results on the goodness of fit to sample data and on the optimal dividends problem are presented.