With the increasing number of women entering the labour force internationally, the role of women is changing. Consequently, researchers are pressed to investigate how females of all cultures balance their work and family responsibilities. Amongst Hindu couples, this issue can either be a source of tension or positive support. An overview of literature indicates that the psychological aspects of dual-career Hindu women have received little attention in South Africa. The current study aimed to explore and describe coping resources and the subjective well-being of full-time employed Hindu mothers. The study took the form of a non-experimental exploratory-descriptive design. Participants were selected through nonprobability convenience sampling. The sample of the study consisted of sixty full-time employed Hindu mothers between the ages of 25 and 45 years of age who had at least one dependent primary school child aged between 7 to 12 years. Various questionnaires were used to collect data for this study. These included a Biographical Questionnaire, The Coping Resources Inventory (CRI), The Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS), and The Affectometer 2 (AFM2). Data was analysed by means of descriptive statistics. Cronbach’s coefficient alphas were utilised to calculate the reliability of the scores of each questionnaire. A multivariate technique was used to determine the amount of clusters formed. A non-hierarchical partitioning technique known as K-means cluster analysis was utilised in this study. An analysis of variance (ANOVA) was utilised in order to compare the mean scores of the various clusters. A post-hoc analysis using the Scheffé test was computed to test for significant differences. Cohen’s d statistics was subsequently used to determine the practical significance of the differences found between the cluster means on each of the measures. The cluster analysis indicated three clusters that differed significantly from one another on all three measures. The results of the CRI indicated that the participants used cognitive and spiritual resources to assist them to cope with the transition from traditional to modern contemporary roles. It was also found that the participants with low coping resources had inferior subjective well-being compared to those who had average and high CRI scores. The findings indicated that the participants were generally satisfied with their lives and experienced high levels of positive affect and low levels of negative affect. However, as a group there was a trend for the participants to have experienced slightly lower levels of global happiness or slightly negative affect. The results of this study broadens the knowledge base of positive psychology with respect to the diverse cultures and gender roles within South Africa. Overall, this study highlighted the value and the need for South African research on the coping resources and subjective well-being of dual-career Hindu mothers.

published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Asian Studies / Master / Master of Philosophy

The purpose of this dissertation is to establish the extent to which women's membership in self-help groups and their involvement in various activities of these groups, with particular reference to Micro Credit programs, impacted their socio-economic empowerment. The objective is to study the socio-economic empowerment impact factors (evidences) in women members of micro-credit self-help groups in rural India upon the self, the family and the community. / Data selected for analyses was based on an operational model of empowerment that encompassed indicators of purported empowerment at the personal, family and community levels. The working hypotheses in quantitative analyses are that there are significant differences in income, savings, assets, expenditure, basic amenities, as well as attitudinal and behavioral changes in the rural women before and after their group membership. / The qualitative interviews helped to assess the life conditions of the women as the process of empowerment before and after their participation in self-help group micro-credit program. The qualitative interviews were to corroborate the veracity of reported progress from the survey to shed some light on the specific factors that contributed to their empowerment in line with their present quality of life at personal, family and community levels. Hence, the impact of the program is measured as the difference in the magnitude of a given parameter between the pre-and post-SHG situations by comparing the life condition of members before joining the self-help group to their condition three years after joining.

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In the past decade, a night shift labor force has gained momentum in the global economy. The hyper-growth of the transnational call center industry in India provides a quintessential example. The night shift requirement of the transnational call industry also intersects with the spatial and temporal construction of gender. Research conducted in 2006 in Mumbai, Bangalore, and Ahmedabad indicates that the nightscape is primarily a male domain (with the exception of prostitutes, bar dancers, and call girls) and women’s entry into this domain generates a range of diverse responses from call centers, their employees, the employees’ families, the media, and the Indian public. This research illustrates that there is no linear outcome to how working the night shift at a call center affects women’s lives. Even though the global nature of the work combined with the relatively high salary is viewed as a liberating force in the lives of workers, in actuality women simultaneously experience opening and constriction for working in the industry. Through the collection of interviews, focus group data, and participant observation gathered during 10 months of fieldwork in India, I examine female night shift workers’ physical, temporal, social, and economic mobility to illustrate how global night shift labor is intersecting with the lives of women in ironic and unsettling ways. Call center employment certainly changes the temporal mobility of some women because it provides them with a legitimate reason to leave the house at night, whereas before this was considered unacceptable. Concerns about promiscuity and “bad character” related to working at night are deflected by linking employment to skill acquisition, high wages, and a contribution to the household. Women’s safety--a code word for their reputation--is preserved by segregating them, via private transport, from the other women of the night. Women consequently become more physically and economically mobile, but through the use of what I term mobility-morality narratives, households continue to maintain regimes of surveillance and control over when and how women come and go. Similarly their social mobility is limited by obligations to support family members and conform to gendered notions of a woman’s place. / text

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