The population of Glen View, a high density residential area in Harare, Zimbabwe is increasing. The effects on area living conditions are deleterious. The situation is expected to deteriorate further due to projected population increases: This creative project presents strategic planning, through Recommendations and Guidelines, for the high density residential area of Glen View. This project involves recommending guidelines for innovative urban planning strategies to address the significant living difficulties existing in Glen View. The sources used were secondary and related published material along with the knowledge gained through my personal experience in the high density residential areas in Harare, Zimbabwe during the summer of 1990. It is intended that this project can serve as an example of how innovative planning can work to create a better quality of life for people living in high density residential areas in developing countries. / Department of Urban Planning

Factors that affect perceived social support in gay, lesbian and bisexual (GLB) college students, including expectations concerning disclosure of sexual minority orientation, perceived family support, and perceived supportiveness of school environment are discussed. GLB identity formation and stigmatization are reviewed. Perceived social support, counselor support/working alliance, and sexual orientation were assessed with the Social Support Questionnaire (SSQ), the Working Alliance Inventory — Short Form (WAI-S) and a modified Kinsey Scale respectively. The implications that variation in each of these factors may have in relation to perceived social support and mental health counseling of GLB college students were considered after data were collected and analyzed. Findings indicate that little difference in perceived social support exist between GLB and heterosexual college students, in perceived social support in counseling relationships, or between genders in the GLB student population. Findings indicate that a significant difference in perceived social support exists between those GLB students who have disclosed their sexual orientation status one year or longer ago and those GLB students who had not disclosed their sexual orientation at all or less than one year ago. / Department of Counseling Psychology and Guidance Services

Conducted within a feminist framework and guided by the principles of grounded theory methodology, this dissertation reports on the findings of a study of women's rape perceptions, undertaken in Beirut, Lebanon. The study relied on 38 interviews, participant observation, and a review of newspaper articles (1996--1999) and organizational documents. / In this dissertation, I argue that perceptions of rape reflect, reinforce, and are supported by dominant social relations based on elements of social location such as gender, religion, socioeconomic status, disability, ethnicity and race. More specifically, I maintain that the relationship between perceptions of rape on one hand, and social relations on the other, is mediated by the centrality of marriage. This mediation is reflected in two processes. First, social relations lead to differential constructions of womanhood and perceived marriageability, which in turn play a large role in shaping perceptions of what counts as rape. Concretely, this impacts on which women are perceived to be consenting to sex and those perceived to be rape victims. / Second, social relations construct a marriage that adheres to specific conditions as the only acceptable union between a man and a woman in Beiruti society. In consequence, these constructions of acceptability shape what counts as "real" rape versus consensual sex. Concretely, this means that relationships that fall outside this construction of acceptability are more readily labeled as rape. / In the first four chapters of the dissertation, I provide background information about the study's theoretical framework, location within the broader empirical scholarship on rape perceptions, and methodology. I also provide detailed information about the Beiruti/Lebanese context. Chapters 5, 6 and 7 are empirical chapters relating some of the findings of the study as they relate to the centrality of marriage and perceptions of rape and consent. Chapter 8 concludes the dissertation with a discussion of the themes of women's agency, the line between sex and rape, and the impact of social relations. Through this discussion, I offer concrete insights for the further development of theory, research and practice with the issue of rape.

This thesis examines women's access to property ownership in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, tracing women's property rights from the pre-communist period to the present transition to a market economy. Focusing on housing and investment property, it finds that women have a high degree of equality in household property ownership. This equality is due in part to gender equality under socialism as well as to traditions of equal inheritance. The thesis then considers women's property ownership in the context of the current 'anti-feminist' movement that encourages Czech and Slovak women to focus their energy on the domestic sphere. It suggests that the withdrawal of women from the workplace and politics may have serious consequences for gender equality.

This research explored cultural perceptions of HIV&amp / AIDS with students at the University of the Western Cape and attempted to understand how these perceptions of the disease reinforce stigma and stigmatising attitudes towards people living with HIV/AIDS. This study investigated HIV/AIDS stigma as a social phenomenon and analysed the socio-cultural and historical roots of HIV/AIDS stigma.

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The fact that social problems cluster in space is not new. Spatial clustering of social problems has been described for several issues such as low educational achievement, crime and drug use, among others. One key factor that has been linked to those problems is the geographical concentration of contextual disadvantage. It has been argued that this observed correlation is only to be attributed to the fact that housing and labour markets create incentives for vulnerable people to cluster in space. Some believe that this clustering generates additional effects leading to poorer outcomes that would not have been observed in the absence of spatial clustering. The literature is unclear on the question of whether there is a "neighbourhood effect" of contextual disadvantage on problems like antisocial behaviour, and how this effect might be transmitted. Neighbourhood studies have been subject to persistent methodological and conceptual shortcomings. These may be partly related to the high costs involved in producing new datasets with adequate spatial measures. The availability of datasets with contextual data is scarce, thus many of the published papers on the subject have drawn on a low number of different studies (usually from the US and Europe). Consequently, the possibility to generalize their findings seems to be limited. In addition, the availability of high quality data (e.g. longitudinal datasets) that can help to rule out known methodological problems is even more restricted. In order to contribute to improving the understanding of how contextual characteristics might influence adolescent antisocial behaviour, firstly, a systematic review of longitudinal neighbourhood effects studies was conducted. In the first part of the thesis, results from the review suggest that the evidence supporting the existence of a direct neighbourhood effect of poverty and concentrated disadvantage on antisocial behaviour is mixed. Contextual effects of concentrated disadvantage also seemed to be highly dependent on model specification, whereby most studies finding significant main effects usually failed to include potentially relevant confounders in regression models. Commonly omitted confounders were related to baseline antisocial behaviour, parenting and peer differential association. Furthermore, evidence was generally unsupportive of the idea that neighbourhood level residential instability, neighbourhood disorder and incivility, social capital and collective efficacy or exposure to violence may have a direct effect on antisocial behaviour. Regarding institutional resources, mixed results were found. Some evidence pointed to the idea that "subcultural" variables (e.g. community level tolerance to deviance) may have an effect on reduced individual level violence. At times, it seemed that more complex models regarding how neighbourhood influences may influence behavioural outcomes might be needed. In the second part of the thesis, data from a longitudinal study, representative of the school population of Santiago de Chile, was merged with independent contextual level information (Census tract, schools and police records) and analysed. By examining the case of Santiago de Chile, a series of ideas regarding how contextual characteristics of activity spaces might relate to the growth of antisocial behaviour diversity over time were explored and tested. Specific attention was paid to examine and discuss how contextual effects might operate, in particular, how contextual disadvantage may influence criminogenic processes of strain, social control and contagion (peer effects). In order to test the proposed hypotheses, a series of hierarchical linear growth models were estimated. No evidence supporting the idea that different types of activity spaces (home based or school based activity spaces) may have differential effects on antisocial behaviour was found. However, results suggest that higher levels of contextual concentrated disadvantage across activity spaces significantly predicted a steeper growth of antisocial behaviour diversity over time. In spite of this, no support was found for the existence of a direct contextual effect once other covariates (i.e. baseline antisocial behaviour, strain, family level social control, contagion effects, among others) had been controlled for. The effect of concentrated disadvantage on antisocial behaviour appears to be mainly indirect; that is, mediated by other covariates. Baseline antisocial behaviour and contagion effects (peer effects) seem to play a relevant role in explaining away the effect of contextual concentrated disadvantage on the growth of antisocial behaviour scores over time. Only partial support for the idea that strain indicators may predict growth in antisocial behaviour diversity over time was found. Additionally, mediation analysis suggests that it may seem unlikely that the effect of contextual concentrated disadvantage on antisocial behaviour would be mediated by increased levels of strain. In spite of this, the effect of family level SES on the growth of antisocial behaviour diversity does seem to be partially mediated by some of the measured strain indicators. Measurement limitations (antisocial behaviour scale could only increase or remain stable) made it difficult to interpret some unexpected findings regarding strain effects. Regarding social control variables, evidence suggested that, even though family level monitoring predicts antisocial behaviour, neither parental attachment nor monitoring seemed to mediate the effect of contextual disadvantage on antisocial behaviour. In relation to school level social control, none of the relevant measures (school value added education and school attachment) significantly predicted antisocial behaviour in the fully specified model. Moreover, none of the hypothesized mediation effects held up, after controlling for other covariates. Regarding contagion effects (measured using peer variables), macro level concentration of juveniles with arrest records failed to predict individual level growth in antisocial behaviour diversity over time. Nevertheless, micro level concentration of antisocial peers in school and/or in activity spaces did predict growth in antisocial behaviour diversity. Results on micro level concentration of antisocial peers where subject to multicollinearity problems and thus were assessed separately. The effect of both variables (concentration in schools and concentration in activity spaces) was partially mediated by best friend's antisocial behaviour. Furthermore, concentrated disadvantage and concentration of deviant schoolmates in activity space interacted to predict a stronger relationship between affiliation to deviant peers and antisocial behaviour . Results are consistent with both geographic propinquity and co-offending process. , because of a low ecometric reliability found for "concentration of antisocial peers in activity space", results regarding this variable are regarded as tentative. An explanatory hypothesis of observed effects was proposed. Results may suggest that the effect of contextual disadvantage on antisocial behaviour is mainly indirect. Contextual disadvantage might be regarded as an expression of spatial clustering (social sorting) of low SES families due to housing and other governmental policies. In average, low SES families display poorer parenting skills, which might provide at least a partial explanation as regards to why higher concentration of antisocial peers (in school or activity spaces) and increased baseline antisocial behaviour scores are observed in disadvantaged contexts. In turn, higher concentration of deviant peers may be facilitating contagion effects. Results suggest that effects of concentrated disadvantage on antisocial behaviour might be due to simultaneous occurrence of compositional and contextual effects. / Study limitations, policy implications, and recommendations for future research are discussed.