Impoverished Contexts Research Articles

What If We All Appear? Audiovisual Workshop in Schools Located in the Metropolitan Region of Buenos Aires

Abstract The outcomes of research conducted through audiovisual workshops in two public state schools located in urban poverty contexts of the Metropolitan Region of Buenos Aires reveal the manner in which students “appear” as protagonists and narrators of lives that are typically portrayed by others. The authors’ hypothesis is that this methodological approach facilitates the inclusion of students living in impoverished contexts, providing alternative perspectives on contemporary ways of life. In this context, the authors understand inclusion as the possibility of their bodies to “appear” and the creation of an alternative narrative regarding precarious circumstances. Their bodies and narratives are often silenced, and they are usually portrayed as symbols of resilience, danger or sensationalism. Their narratives are useful to discomfort the audience about social inequalities. Within this framework, the authors demonstrate how the audiovisuals by the students offer different avenues for making a presence in the political landscape, distinct from the conventional ways in which individuals experiencing poverty and precarity are conventionally depicted.

A Qualitative Exploration of How Black Mothers Experiencing Poverty Make Sense of the Strong Black Woman Stereotype

The strong Black woman (SBW) stereotype is a universal phenomenon understood and experienced by Black women. In this qualitative study, I examined how 16 Black women who are mothers make sense of the SBW stereotype, highlighting how their lived experiences of mothering children in high-burden urban neighborhoods and their experiences at the intersection of race, class, and gender, shape their understanding of the SBW stereotype. Using qualitative phenomenological methods and semi-structured interviews, thematic analysis of interview data revealed three main themes regarding the perception and experience of the SBW stereotype as: (a) ambiguous and contested expectations central to Black motherhood, (b) engenders a sense of loss, and (c) shapes the experience and expression of depression. Study findings support and extend a growing body of work linking the SBW stereotype to depressive symptoms and overall mental health among Black women. This study also highlights the importance of examining how Black women's intersectional identities and contexts, in this case place or where one lives, shape the experience and perception of the SBW stereotype. My hope is that clinicians develop a comprehensive and nuanced understanding of the SBW stereotype and its potential mental health effects for all Black mothers. Findings also suggest a need for clinicians, researchers, and policymakers to create empowering opportunities for Black mothers, especially those mothering in impoverished contexts, to express their authentic and whole selves in service of healing themselves, their families, and communities.

Combined nutrition and psychosocial stimulation intervention for child development in rural China: the role of parental resources

Early childhood interventions played a critical role in improving child development in impoverished contexts. Combined nutrition and psychosocial stimulation interventions (CNPSI) have shown more benefits than stand-alone supplemental nutrition interventions (SNI) in many developing countries. Based on a cluster randomized controlled trial in rural northwestern China, this study tested alternative theory-driven hypotheses regarding how primary caregiver’s education and family income may moderate the CNPSI’s effects on child growth environment and developmental delay risk. The trial cluster randomized 1,566 children aged 7–33 months from 111 villages (clusters) in Huachi County, Gansu Province, into an SNI group (N = 852) and a CNPSI group (N = 714). Multilevel regression models suggested that the CNPSI group had better home growth environment (p < 0·001) and lower risk of developmental delay (p < 0·001) than the SNI group. The CNPSI’s impacts on home growth environment and development delay were weaker for parents with higher education levels. However, household income did not significantly moderate the CNPSI effect for either outcome. Future interventions need to attend to the educational disparities in the resource-poor context.

Transfer of category learning to impoverished contexts.

Learning often happens in ideal conditions, but then must be applied in less-than-ideal conditions - such as when a learner studies clearly illustrated examples of rocks in a book but then must identify them in a muddy field. Here we examine whether the benefits of interleaving (vs. blocking) study schedules, as well as the use of feature descriptions, supports the transfer of category learning in new, impoverished contexts. Specifically, keeping the study conditions constant, we evaluated learners' ability to classify new exemplars in the same neutral context versus in impoverished contexts in which certain stimulus features are occluded. Over two experiments, we demonstrate that performance in new, impoverished contexts during test is greater for participants who received an interleaved (vs. blocked) study schedule, both for novel and for studied exemplars. Additionally, we show that this benefit extends to both a short (3-min) or long (48-h) test delay. The presence of feature descriptions during learning had no impact on transfer. Together, these results extend the growing literature investigating how changes in context during category learning or test impacts performance and provide support for the use of interleaving to promote the far transfer of category knowledge to impoverished contexts.

A population-based combination strategy to improve the cervical cancer screening coverage rate in Bamako, Mali.

Cervical cancer screening coverage rate is <5% in Sub-Saharan Africa and <2% in French- speaking African countries. In 2016, we implemented strategies to improve cervical cancer screening in Bamako, the "Weekend70 program". The present study objectives are to determine the effect of this program on women's participation in cervical cancer screening in Bamako, and to estimate the cervical cancer screening coverage rate in Bamako. From 1 January 2016 to 31 July 2020, we conducted an operational research by developing several strategies to improve the cervical cancer screening coverage rate among adolescents and women ≥15years old in Bamako, Mali. The strategies consisted of awareness-raising activities, strengthening of screening practices in healthcare facilities and cost-free cervical cancer screening during the weekend. Descriptive statistics were presented. The cervical cancer coverage rate was calculated by dividing the number of women screened by the total number of women ≥20years old, based on Mali demographic data. The total number of women screened was 289924. Residents from Bamako represented 91.9% (266436/289924) vs 8.1% (23488/289924) who lived outside Bamako. The mean age was 33.2 (± 11.5)years old. Around 46.1% of participants attending the cervical cancer screening were between 30 and 49years old (World Health Organization prioritized target age for cervical cancer screening). Women ≥60years old represented <5%. Cervical cancer screening participation increased significantly, from <800 women screened per week before the implementation of the program to a peak of 4100 women screened per week during the "Weekend70 program". Overall, the cervical cancer screening coverage rates at the end of the study among women ≥20years old was 47.3%, and 56.9% in the WHO target population. In an impoverished context, a multi-component strategy significantly increases cervical cancer screening participation.

Human Smuggling from Wollo, Ethiopia to Saudi Arabia: Askoblay Criminals or Enablers of Dreams?

Abstract Sensationalist accounts of human smuggling from Ethiopia towards Saudi Arabia allege that operations are controlled by criminal networks who converge in a variety of illegal markets posing a threat to national security. Such convergence narratives construct Ethiopian human smuggling as an organized criminal business that extracts profits from and inflicts violence on vulnerable people seeking a clandestine passage to work in the Gulf States. Our ethnographic research in Wollo, Ethiopia, challenges these narratives by showing that smuggling networks are developed through personalised relationships, based on co-ethnic bonds rather than extended and complex criminal networks. Smuggling has emerged in a particular context of surveillance and enforcement and the motives of smugglers are complex, making simple characterizations difficult. Smuggling is enabled by ethnic links on either side of the border where earnings from facilitation boost incomes in an otherwise impoverished context.

Emprendimientos de subsistencia: Concepto, alcances y limitaciones bajo el modelo neoliberal

This article considers that in the subsistence entrepreneurships exist a social background, political and economic, which affects negatively the possibility of living worthily in the actual time and enjoy the freedom of participation that the marketing system offers. From there, it didn’t pretend to offer an unidirectional posture around such initiatives, but conversely, favor from a reflection supported by different authors, the identification of different ways of sociability, moral virtues and develop of capabilities in the subjects that require them, on the understood that these constitute themselves in alternative ways to affront the social crisis product of the early predation for the neoliberal economical directive, in those already impoverished contexts and with a strong threat in front of the possibility of living.

Finding the missing variables: A systematic review of mathematics improvement strategies for South African public schools

The future of South Africa’s economic growth rests on addressing critical scarce-skills labour shortages. Matriculants are called on to break the cycle of poverty by entering the scarce-skills workforce. The demonstration of a high level of mathematics, science, and technology competency is viewed as a gateway towards achieving this goal. The South African Department of Basic Education has invested much effort towards improving mathematics, science and technology competencies among learners by implementing various mathematics improvement strategies in public schools. The existing research, however, shows that these initiatives have yielded little success among learners from impoverished schooling contexts. Reasons for this limitation were explored by means of the systematic review reported on in this paper. The review focused on literature relating to mathematics improvement strategies in public schools implemented by the South African Department of Basic Education. The limitations of these initiatives were critically evaluated and gaps in various documented strategies were identified. The findings highlight an evident need for a shift in focus of future interventions if the national goal to address scarce-skills labour demands through educating the impoverished South African youth is to be successfully realised. Suggestions are offered on how this change might happen. Keywords: critical variables; mathematics improvement strategies; social science; socio-economic inequality; South African public schools; underperformance

A Historical Review of Local Intermediaries in Impoverished Contexts

The role of local intermediaries in impoverished contexts has been a focus of attention within the marketing and development literature since shortly after WWII. A systematic review of this work reveals that while much of this literature identifies market intermediaries as exploitative and unspecialized entities, other work views them more positively. These conflicting accounts, rarely supported empirically, have resulted in diverging policy recommendations. Many scholars call for the wholesale removal of such intermediaries, while a lesser number argue that they can and should be supported. The dominant view as regards local intermediaries reflects three prevailing biases in the marketing and development literature: an emphasis on transformation; a rejection of the local; and a favouring of consumers and producers over intermediaries. This paper describes these biases and proposes shaping constructs, potential future research questions, theoretical lenses, and methods of analysis that should ideally guide future scholarship on the role of local intermediaries within impoverished contexts.

Comparative Approaches for Spurring Innovative Opportunities in Base-Of-The-Pyramid Markets

Despite intense efforts by development organizations to generate entrepreneurial growth in base-of-the pyramid (BOP) markets over the past several decades, the result has been largely a proliferation of ventures that simply imitate existing business. To achieve a more sustainable and transformative level of development, local entrepreneurs must hone the ability to identify new and more innovative business opportunities. While current theory offers two competing descriptions of how entrepreneurs come to identify new business opportunities – using an ‘ends- focused’ approach vs. a ‘means-focused’ approach – there is no prescription offered as to which would be more likely to lead to the identification of more novel opportunities within impoverished contexts. In an effort to contribute meaningfully to both academic and practical discussions, we employed a quasi-experimental field study involving 147 entrepreneurs in rural Ethiopia. Participants were randomly assigned to receive either an ‘ends-focused’ or ‘means-focused’ 5-hour training session, and subsequently asked to identify as many new business opportunities as possible. Our results suggest that ‘means-focused’ trainings may lead to the identification of more novel business opportunities within impoverished contexts. However, we also find that the extent to which ‘means-focused’ training is more efficacious is dependent on the entrepreneur’s level of exposure to other markets.

Focus on Cataphora: Experiments in Context

Since Chomsky 1976 , it has been claimed that focus on a referring expression blocks coreference in a cataphoric dependency (* Hisi mother loves JOHNi vs. Hisi mother LOVES Johni ). In three auditory experiments and a written questionnaire, we show that this fact does not hold when a referent is unambiguously established in the discourse (cf. Williams 1997 , Bianchi 2009 ) but does hold otherwise, validating suggestions in Rochemont 1978 , Horvath 1981 , and Rooth 1985 . The perceived effect of prosody, we argue, building on Williams’s original insight and deliberate experimental manipulation of Rochemont’s and Horvath’s examples, is due to the fact that deaccenting the R-expression allows hearers to accommodate a salient referent via a “question under discussion” ( Roberts 1996/2012 , Rooth 1996 ), to which the pronoun can refer in ambiguous or impoverished contexts. This heuristic is not available in the focus cases, and we show that participants’ interpretation of the pronoun is ambivalent here.

BEHIND THE SEAMS: UNVEILING SOCIAL INJUSTICES IN A SCHOOL’S ENFORCEMENT OF PRESCRIBED DRESS RULES

Research on school drop-out rates in democratic South Africa cites school uniforms among the predominant causes of high school children, from impoverished contexts, dropping out of school. In light of this finding, this paper offers a critical examination of a school’s uniform rules against South Africa’s National Schools Uniform policy. Research data presented and discussed in this paper is drawn from a small scale case study, conducted in a working class South African school. Hermeneutics provided the analytical lens through which data were analysed. Critical theory offered a theoretical framework for data interpretation. The findings unearth social injustices which have become embedded in the schools dress code, when the national uniform policies were translated into school rules by a school’s leadership. The findings cannot be generalized to other schools. However, they do provide some insight into how children from impoverished backgrounds may be unfairly labelled, unjustly treated and possibly drop out of school, on account of the biased way in which a schools dress code expectations are decided on and enforced by a school’s leadership. Keywords: School Uniforms, Democratic Policies, Working-class schools, Subjective Dress Codes, Insensitive Dress Rules.

Researcher identity and childhood memories in a study of vulnerable children in Swaziland

Contrary to conventional wisdom, which construes scientific research as objective and value-free, this article foregrounds my social identity as a female, who grew up (and was schooled) in a deep rural, impoverished context of Swaziland, and my subjective childhood memories in shaping a qualitative-narrative study of six vulnerable children in a rural primary school in Swaziland. The article denotes the significance of productive remembering as a critical basis for knowledge acquisition and production. It contributes to ongoing avant-garde theorising about the centrality of researcher’s reflexivity and positionality in the scientific processes of knowledge acquisition and production. I show how subjective remembering was at the heart of the conceptual, theoretical and methodological decisions undertaken in this study, and how, almost 30 years later, the vulnerable children’s schooling experiences still mirrored my own childhood memories about schooling in this context. Therefore, highlighting the pervasive nature and, indeed, cross-generational extent of the vulnerable children’s unfavourable schooling experiences. Just like my childhood memories and identities, the vulnerable children’s schooling experiences were entangled in complex, enduring and discursively regulated power-laden social relationships. Hence, the article recommends foregrounding and addressing vulnerable children’s identities and their power positioning within social relationships in their contexts as a basis upon which strategies for improving the quality of vulnerable children’s rural schooling experiences should be founded.

Dynamics and perceptions of social support and their impact on well-being: a qualitative study of adolescents in Northern Ghana

AbstractAlthough perceived social support has been studied in various contexts, there is still scant research on qualitative accounts of how perceptions of support for adolescents living in impoverished contexts are formed and relate to psychological well-being. We explored the dynamics and perceptions of social support among 18 purposefully selected school-going adolescents in the northern region of Ghana. Emerging thematic areas comprised: the dynamics of familial networks that included quality familial relationships; valued support from friends; and the negative aspects of various social relations. With family – and peer social relations perceived as beneficial for practical advice and – support, the mere existence of social ties was not the adolescents’ most important consideration for well-being. Instead, the quality of interactions across different social networks emerged as more instrumental for relational and overall well-being. Understanding the sources of problematic social interactions, such as...

Interrogating citizen journalism practices: a case study of Rhodes University’s Lindaba Ziyafika Project

ABSTRACTSeveral scholars have noted that citizen journalism in the West is essentially an online phenomenon, driven by the affordability of Internet technologies. In Africa, projects such as Ushahidi in Kenya have been enabled by platforms such as cell phones and social networks. Voices of Africa, based in southern Africa, publishes on the web only. Publishing on the Internet presumes a citizenry which is relatively well educated; has familiarity with, and access to, new media as a form of social communication; and is confident in their right to participate in newly developed public spheres – particularly those online. In Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa, the citizen journalists recruited to work for the Iindaba Ziyafika (‘the news is coming’) project attached to the community newspaper Grocott’s Mail, came from a community in which there is 70 per cent unemployment, poor schooling and a lack of basic facilities such as running water, indoor sanitation and electricity. In the interests of understanding whether citizen journalism could work in such an impoverished context with little access to the Internet, and what form it would take, this project was selected to investigate the working practices of these journalists. This research is useful given that the social situation of Grahamstown might produce a different kind of practice than that exhibited by other citizen journalists in different parts of the world.

Anticipation in Real-World Scenes: The Role of Visual Context and Visual Memory.

The human sentence processor is able to make rapid predictions about upcoming linguistic input. For example, upon hearing the verb eat, anticipatory eye-movements are launched toward edible objects in a visual scene (Altmann & Kamide, 1999). However, the cognitive mechanisms that underlie anticipation remain to be elucidated in ecologically valid contexts. Previous research has, in fact, mainly used clip-art scenes and object arrays, raising the possibility that anticipatory eye-movements are limited to displays containing a small number of objects in a visually impoverished context. In Experiment 1, we confirm that anticipation effects occur in real-world scenes and investigate the mechanisms that underlie such anticipation. In particular, we demonstrate that real-world scenes provide contextual information that anticipation can draw on: When the target object is not present in the scene, participants infer and fixate regions that are contextually appropriate (e.g., a table upon hearing eat). Experiment 2 investigates whether such contextual inference requires the co-presence of the scene, or whether memory representations can be utilized instead. The same real-world scenes as in Experiment 1 are presented to participants, but the scene disappears before the sentence is heard. We find that anticipation occurs even when the screen is blank, including when contextual inference is required. We conclude that anticipatory language processing is able to draw upon global scene representations (such as scene type) to make contextual inferences. These findings are compatible with theories assuming contextual guidance, but posit a challenge for theories assuming object-based visual indices.

Evaluating the Outcome of Cultural Adaptations of Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy for Adult Depression: a Meta-Analysis of Treatment Studies in Developing Countries

Cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) is promoted as a treatment of choice for adult depression in the developed world. In low- and middle-income countries (LAMICS), the standard treatment protocol is often adapted to meet the socio-cultural needs of the context. The authors conducted a systematic review of all controlled studies of culturally-adapted CBT involving adults with depression resident in LAMICS. The pooled mean effect size from 11 studies (n = 1602) was large, suggesting that CBT appears efficacious in treating depression in impoverished contexts. Specifically, treatments implemented with individuals were more successful than those administered to groups. Interventions employed by lay workers proved similarly successful. These results are encouraging, as the widespread adoption of CBT may potentially contribute to reducing the treatment gap for depression in resource-poor LAMICS.

The melancholy of murderous mothers: Depression and the medicalization of women’s anger

Informed by recent feminist critiques of the notion of depression, we explored how a group of South African low-income mothers who have been diagnosed with depression subjectively describe and explain their psychological distress. Working within a feminist materialist-discursive framework, we focused both on the explicit content of what the women were saying and on the implicit or underlying discourses that informed their narratives. Our findings suggest that respondents often subjectively experienced their psychological distress as anger, which was also articulated in violence directed at their children. This suggests that not only does the diagnosis of depression serve to medicalize the distress of participants, but it may simultaneously serve to obscure their anger at having to mother in adverse conditions. In exploring reasons for their anger, we found that participants were frustrated with trying to live up to idealized notions of motherhood in impoverished contexts.

The Role of the Family Institution in Economic Activity: Evidence from Indian Slum Households

Firms in impoverished settings exist largely outside of formal institutional boundaries; however, they are not void of institutional influence. We shed light on one of the most fundamental institutions, which we suggest governs much of economic activity in impoverished contexts: the family. We integrate institutional and resource-based theories to explicate the role of the family in impoverished business activity. We develop theory to explain how the family constrains entrepreneurial behavior through pressure to conform to accepted norms, yet enhances business performance through the provision of critical resources. We test our hypotheses using a unique sample of households and firms in Indian slums. Our paper contributes by developing theory on the role of informal institutions (the family) in business activity and providing a preliminary investigation into factors that may influence firm success in impoverished settings.

Two-year-olds can begin to acquire verb meanings in socially impoverished contexts

By two years of age, toddlers are adept at recruiting social, observational, and linguistic cues to discover the meanings of words. Here, we ask how they fare in impoverished contexts in which linguistic cues are provided, but no social or visual information is available. Novel verbs are presented in a stream of syntactically informative sentences, but the sentences are not embedded in a social context, and no visual access to the verb’s referent is provided until the test phase. The results provide insight into how toddlers may benefit from overhearing contexts in which they are not directly attending to the ambient speech, and in which no conversational context, visual referent, or child-directed conversation is available.