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The easing of legal and unauthorized entry to South Africa has made the country a new destination for Black immigrants. As this population continues to grow, its children have begun to experience South African schools in an array of uniquely challenging ways. For these immigrant youth, forging a sense of identity may be their single greatest challenge. There is however, very little research on the ways in which immigrant student identities are framed, challenged, asserted and negotiated in South African schools. Accordingly, this study asks how do immigrant students speak about their identifications in light of their negotiation of the school and social spaces in South Africa. Utilising the theoretical frameworks of understanding immigrant identities and identity pathways, this research study attempts to understand the unique experiences of Black immigrant youth inside South African schools. Findings were multi-fold in nature. First, although immigrant students' ease of assimilation into the chosen reference group was to some degree sanctioned by their phenotypic racial features, their attempt at "psychosocial passing" was politically motivated. Second, immigrant students did not readily classify according to skin pigmentocracy. Third, the majority of immigrant students heightened their ethnic self-awareness in forming their identity, but also assumed hyphenated identities. Fourth, immigrant students were not seen as having an identity, but rather as being "plugged into a category with associated characteristics or features". Fifth immigrant students forged a "continental identity". And sixth, the self-agency of immigrant students was twofold in nature; not only did they want to improve their own condition, but there seemed to be an inherent drive to improve the human condition of others.

Most studies that explore the impact of relative standing on subjective well-being use objective measures of the individual's relative position, such as the mean income of the reference group or the individual's ranking in the relevant income distribution. In this paper, using a new household survey from South Africa, we are able to derive subjective measures of relative standing, as information is collected on individuals' "perceptions" of where they rank in the income distribution. We find considerable differences between objective and subjective measures of an individual's relative ranking. Furthermore, our results suggest that an individual's perceived relative status has a significantly larger effect on subjective well-being than objective measures of relative status based on reported income. We also examine the effects on subjective well-being of how individuals perceive their relative position in the income distribution to have changed since childhood, and what they expect their relative position to be in the future. We find that future upward mobility has a smaller effect than upward mobility compared to one's past, suggesting that life satisfaction is influenced more by what has been achieved than by anticipated achievements.

This paper explores which items people living in South African informal urban settlements regard as essential for an acceptable standard of living, in the context of the high levels of service delivery protests in urban areas. Comparisons are made with people in rural former homeland areas which are shown to have similar levels of deprivation and service delivery dissatisfaction and yet have few such protests. People in informal urban areas rated infrastructure-related items higher than people in rural former homelands. It is argued that inequality and people's reference groups could help explain these attitudinal discrepancies and the locations of protests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper tests the relative income hypothesis by considering the relationship between mortality, income and relative deprivation in South Africa using individual-level data on income and five measures of relative deprivation each with a different reference group. We find that income tends to be protective of, and relative deprivation detrimental to health, but the latter often gives a better account of mortality than does income alone. For some population groups the fit is improved in specifications which include both income and relative deprivation. Overall, there seems to be solid evidence in support of the relative income hypothesis, particularly for the more economically disadvantaged population groups. Relative deprivation is especially significant when age is the reference group, suggesting that the comparison of socio-economic standing that has an impact on health tends to happen within cohorts. The results are robust to splitting the sample into urban/rural subsamples and to looking at the incidence of illness as the health outcome rather than mortality. While little is known about the mechanisms underlying the effect of relative deprivation on health and mortality, the consistent evidence in favor of age as a reference group, particularly in a context like South Africa''s suggests that intra-cohort comparisons should be an avenue for more in depth investigation. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]