This study explored the barriers to education experienced by a group of learners in the context of HIV and AIDS. It also examined the extent to which HIV/AIDS is viewed as an exclusionary factor in the schooling experiences of primary school children. The research site was a co-educational school that is a service provider to mostly disadvantaged learners from a lower socio-economic background. There were twelve participants in the study: six girls and six boys. Four focus group interviews were conducted with the children to explore their experiences of potential barriers to education. Within the focus group sessions, various participatory research techniques were employed in data collection, including projective techniques, drawing exercises and ranking exercises. The study provides evidence of a complex, at times contradictory, and intricate web of barriers to education that learners experience in this schooling context. In general, various contextual factors have a profoundly negative impact on the children’s schooling experiences, in particular their access to quality education. Children are exposed to multiple, complex layers of risk and trauma from growing up in the context of HIV and AIDS. There is little evidence that the school has the resources to provide emotional and psychological support. The study has implications for the development of policy and intervention strategies that may meet these children’s needs. Finally, the study makes a contribution to research methodology in its use of participatory research techniques for data collection. The data exemplifies that children are active participants in and competent interpreters of their world – in this case their lives and schooling in the context of HIV and AIDS. / Thesis (M.Ed.) - University of KwaZulu Natal, Durban, 2008.

Protocol: The study reported information from case records of 17 new mothers and their children who received an agency's services. Mother's expectations about their child's accomplishment of four developmental tasks (controlled crying, walking, toilet training and accepting discipline) were compared with mother's practices over a four to five year period.Participants: Seventeen adult women (currently 18 years and older) who were mothers of newborns and who received continuous agency services during a four to five year period agreed to participate in the case record review.Information Handling: When mother's signed release form was returned, the agency made the mother's case record available for selecting information pertinent to the study questions. The investigator focused on the caseworker's anecdotal notes of home visits, written narrative interviews, biannual goal-setting forms, and the Denver Developmental Screening Tests (Denver II) related to the mother and baby.Analysis: Information was grouped around two major themes. One theme was the mothers' expectation statements and mothers' practices about their child's development. The other major theme was the description of the caseworker's informal educational techniques and role modeling of appropriate behaviors.Conclusions: The most common developmental patterns were: Eleven of 17 mothers held expectations about their behaviors related to controlled crying; seven of 17 mothers' expectations matched their child's age for walking; nine of 17 mothers' behaviors didn't match their expectations related to toilet training their child; and seven of 17 mothers' behaviors matched their expectations with regard to accepting discipline.The most common pattern was that the case worker provided appropriate amounts of literature; discussed development, both general and focused, at numerous home visits; administered and discussed developmental testing approximately every six months; referred and coordinated developmental delay treatments; and assist the mother in providing the treatment plans. / Department of Educational Studies

The objective of this thesis is to understand how poor farm households in developing countries are affected by and cope with the legacy of internal war. The theoretical analysis is based on a peasant household model for land abundant countries as war can be shown to weaken markets, re-enforce household subsistence and increase overall land abundance. The empirical analysis uses regression techniques and a household survey from post-war northern Mozambique to assess the implications of the war legacy for land access, coping strategies, and household welfare. The key findings include that war can enhance the degree of land abundance while also creating barriers to land access for some households, thus re-defining land abundance as a household-level concept. Land emerges as the least war vulnerable asset thus encouraging households to shift to land-based subsistence activities during the war. The experience of war increases the number of endogenously determined land variables, which should therefore be reflected in models of African land use. The thesis advances the literature of household coping strategies by focussing on little researched post-disaster and war-induced strategies. Households are found to respond to indirect war effects and thus to rely on subsistence and non-market activities and to make selective use of markets. Surprisingly, social exchange does not play a large role for insuring incomes. Finally, the thesis finds that the war legacy continues to depress household welfare for many years after the end of the conflict, which is attributed to a variety of poverty traps. Importantly, and in contrast to other studies of post-war Mozambique, education and cotton adoption are not found to enhance household welfare significantly but a larger area farmed does. The findings indicate that post-war reconstruction policy should re-capitalise household endowments and stimulate rural markets as part of a broadly based programme of rural development.

This study is a multi-level analysis of the pervasive phenomenon of what is termed here as low-fee private (LFP) schooling in India focusing on Lucknow District, Uttar Pradesh. The significance of the study is its focus on a private sector uniquely characterised as one targeted to a clientele traditionally excluded from private education. The study follows a single-case embedded case study research design of the type explained by Yin (1994). Its guiding framework comprises theoretical levels of analysis which are the individual, organisational, and institutional, corresponding to the case sub-units of household, school, and state respectively. The research design is structured through a new institutional paradigm which is also used to analyse results at the institutional level. Data were collected through interviews, observations, documents, and field notes. Direct household data sources were 60 parents/close family members at two focus schools (one urban and one rural); school sources were owners/principals of 10 case study schools (five urban and five rural); and state sources were 10 government officials. Analysis of the 100 formal interviews, informal interviews, observation events, and field notes followed a qualitative approach through an inductively derived analytic framework. Structured portions of household and school interviews were analysed through descriptive statistics providing data on household and school background characteristics. Documents were analysed using a modified content analysis approach. Implications of individual-level results lie in highlighting the schooling choices and patterns of a group that is otherwise regarded as homogenous, i.e. children are not sent to school because parents are uninterested in schooling and fail to see its relevance. In fact, results indicate that disadvantaged groups accessing the LFP sector in the study are active choosers who made deeply considered and systematic choices about their children's education. A model to explain their school choice processes is empirically derived. Data suggest that households employed the strategies of staying, fee-bargaining, exit, and fee-jumping to engage with LFP case study schools. Organisational-level results focus on case study school profiles, their organisational structures, and the strategies they employed to operate in the new schooling market. Results also focus on a qualitative understanding of the challenges case study schools faced as LFP schools, both by the institutional context and household demands. Finally, data point to the mechanisms instituted within the schools to deal with household needs and demands and the changing household-school relationship. The implications of institutional-level analysis He in exposing inconsistencies in the application of the formal institutional framework (FIF) for schooling to case study and other LFP schools by institutional actors. Differences in the FIF in principle and in practice are linked to perverse incentives embedded within it. The results strongly indicate the existence of what is termed here as, the shadow institutional framework (SIF), employed by case study schools to mediate the FIF to their institutional advantage. The SIF comprises internal institutions common across the set of case study schools, allowing them to form linkages with other LFP schools and exchange institutional information; and external institutions or higher order institutions governing how case study schools interacted with the FIF for basic and/or secondary education and private schooling. The SIF tied together an otherwise independent set of LFP schools as a de-facto sub-sector of the greater private sector. The study's main contributions are its analysis of an emerging local model of formal private schooling for disadvantaged groups; extending new institutional theory's application to education; and the methodological contribution of mediating the researcher's positionality through currencies.

No description available.

No description available.

Environmental degradation from problems of the 'Brown Agenda' is an everyday reality in Kenya's rapidly growing urban centres; and it is the low-income majority who are most affected. Deficient water supply and sanitation, inadequate solid waste disposal, and poor drainage are among the foremost problems that characterize informal settlements in which indigent urbanites are compelled to live. Analysis of environmental problems at settlement and household level can provide vital information about the appraisive environmental perceptions and cognitions of inhabitants of informal settlements, as well as their satisfaction with the infrastructural services to which they have access and their housing conditions, in general. Such information is essential to the formulation of apposite strategies for sustainable improvement of environmental conditions in informal settlements. Based largely on a comprehensive review of theoretical perspectives on the urban housing question in the South, international policy responses and experiences with settlement upgrading, this thesis seeks a better understanding of the socioeconomic and physio-environmental dynamics of urban low-income informal settlements and the formulation and implementation of upgrading policies. A comparative analysis of two majengos in Kenya-one of which has been upgraded while the other has not-serves to contextualize the study. The central thesis in the present study is that settlement upgrading is the most rational approach to improving the residential circumstances of the urban poor majority in Kenya. Applying a fundamentally liberal approach, the development of pragmatic opportunities is discussed, and pursuable policies and programmes, which are realistic and implementable, for effective environmental planning and management of urban low-income informal settlements in Kenya are proposed.

The study of the history of children has been marginalised over the centuries. Children are the lifeblood of any society and play a significant role in its development. It was only recently that the role of children was recognized. This study focuses on reasons for indigency in early twentieth century Durban. It establishes the various socio - economic factors responsible for this phenomenon. This led to the abuse of children's rights and the rise of child indigency. The incidence of child labour and vagrant children roaming the streets of Durban led to white philanthropists forming the Durban Child Welfare Society. Indigent children of colour were denied access to this welfare society. In 1927, two institutions were established to cater for indigent Indian children, The Aryan Benevolent Children's Home and The Durban Indian Child Welfare. The Great Depression saw a phenomenal increase in the number of indigent children in Durban. Municipal authorities were reluctant to confront the rising tide of indigent black children. After negative press coverage, the municipality established the Bantu Child Welfare Society in 1936. This was inadequate to cater for the burgeoning number of indigent children. Social activists later developed places of safety, such as the Brandon Bantu Home and the Motala Lads' Hostel to assist indigent African and Indian children The outbreak of World War Two and a relaxation of influx controlled to a diaspora of Africans to the city. The reversal of influx controlled to a series of socio-economic challenges for African children particularly. Unemployment, coupled with indigency, soared resulting in children loitering the streets of white suburbs in search of jobs and food. Complaints from recalcitrant white residents led to the arrest and detention of children between the ages of 6 and 16 at the notorious Overport Detention Barracks. Appalling conditions at these barracks led to a public outcry. Child care crusaders, ensured that appropriate action was taken to rectify the situation. This prompted a shift in government policy towards childcare for black indigent children in Durban. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of Durban-Westville, 2002.

An impression which has dominated both the clinical setting and research literature is that patients with temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) not infrequently issue "bitter" complaints about their memory function. This observation has rarely been subjected to investigation, based as it is, on the implicit assumption that TLE subjects are "entitled" to a memory disturbance given the involvement of a critical memory structure (i.e, hippocampus) in the pathogenesis of the disorder. While it is almost axiomatic that clinicians become aware of memory difficulties because of the subjective complaints issued by patients, there is growing awareness that the relationship between complaint and objective memory disturbance is a complex and often counterintuitive one. This is particularly true of many patients with TLE who while complaining about their memory function often do so in the presence of objectively normal interictal memory function. / This thesis addressed the question: Why do patients with TLE complain about their memory? It was premised on the notion that memory self-report is not a unidimensional construct explicable in terms of an underlying memory dysfunction alone, but the perception and expression of memory may arise from seemingly disparate sources. The principal objective of the thesis was to systematically and comprehensively investigate the complaint in TLE, and to derive an understanding of the variables which contribute to the perception and expression of poor memory in members of this population. The variables selected for investigation emerged from a detailed review of the literature and can be grouped into five broad conceptual domains: demographic, epileptological, psychological, cognitive, and metacognitive. (For complete abstract open document)

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2006. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.