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COVID-19 not only had deleterious effects on the overall well-being of individuals and communities but also amplified existing structural impediments such as food insecurity, unemployment, and poor access to resources. Under-resourced communities thus felt the brunt of the pandemic, having to find resourceful ways to combat vulnerabilities brought on by the crisis. The dire states in which such communities throughout the world found themselves inspired various acts of solidarity and support in the face of adversity. The primary aim of the study was to explore the perceptions and experiences of community solidarity and support during the COVID-19 pandemic of members of two under-resourced communities in South Africa. To obtain a comprehensive account of these perceptions and experiences, a qualitative community case study design was used, and thirty key informant interviews and four focus group discussions were conducted with multiple community stakeholders across the two communities. Participant responses were explored through two main themes, namely: (1) The brutal materialization of lockdown in communities and (2) Experiences of and contributions to community solidarity and support. This article attempts to emphasize the value of collective action during times of crisis and to encourage the promotion of sustainable community solidarity initiatives as a way to mitigate future crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Globally, the appraisal of educators remains a contested issue as the process, which aims to provide support and development to educators, is generally considered a punitive measure for educators. Within the South African context, the Integrated Quality Management System is used to evaluate educators. Drawing on Fraser's theories of social justice, this article explores the perspectives of 11 educators regarding educator developmental appraisal in post-apartheid South Africa as a catalyst for social (in)justice. Data was collected through semi-structured interviews and analysed using critical discourse analysis. This article highlights the importance of social justice practices in enhancing learner achievement and foregrounds the (in)justices often witnessed during the appraisal process. Findings reveal that the developmental appraisal process has the potential to promote social justice; however, contextual factors seem to be hindering the successful implementation of the appraisal process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emotional labour (EL) is an integral and inextricable, organic aspect of human interaction and research. This paper offers the reflections of activist researchers on the nuances of EL and compassion when conducting community-engaged participatory action research in low-income settings. The authors employed critical collaborative autoethnography and reflexivity to disentangle their reflections on EL. The results comprise their testimonials (journal entries and reflections), while the discussion focuses on several themes that reflect a rich tapestry of collective experiential learnings and conversations. The EL process manifested the following themes: labour of love, looking inward: reflections of disquietude; internal and external conflict, emotional engagement and human loss; and emotional labour. The authors recognise that EL must transcend privilege, positionality and power dynamics, and that researchers must espouse compassion, empathy, mindfulness and active listening when interacting with individuals in an organisation and/or with community members. This recognition may promote solace, humaneness and efficiency when expanding EL within the context of community-engaged participatory action research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to highlight the push factors leading to children's vulnerabilities especially in historically impoverished communities in post-apartheid South Africa (SA). These push factors are hangovers that Black1 children continue to experience in their daily lives because of the ongoing impact of poverty and family behavioural patterns. Furthermore, the paper highlights how socially constructed violence is perpetuated in the form of gangsterism when factors such as unemployment, mental health issues and lack of services contribute to a lack of care, safety and protection of children, alluding to the State's failure to provide basic services in impoverished communities. The lack of access to services coupled with the need to protect the rights of children promulgated in the UN Declaration of the Rights of the Child highlight how the State is directly implicated in the neglect of SA children's wellbeing. Data collection included focus group discussions and semi-structured interviews with adult community members from two South African communities, exploring perceptions and experiences of everyday violence. Collaborative thematic analyses was used for analyses. Core themes that emerged centre on perceptions on the various dynamics within the family system that ruptures the family system and the various pull factors that attracts children to other replacement family systems. These factors are discussed under sub-themes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Street children remain a social phenomenon in many low- and middle-income countries in which they experience alienation, discrimination, and social and spatial exclusion. The aim of this study was to identify and understand how girl street children perceive safety, space, and their livelihood on the urban streets of Yogyakarta, Indonesia, and to identify the multilevel components and processes that can contribute to improving the effectiveness of interventions for this group. A mixed-methods design was applied using a critical community based participatory research and asset-mapping approach. Both quantitative descriptive statistics and qualitative thematic content analysis were used. The results highlight that the girl street children are subjected to various forms of hegemony linked to power, space and place, gender, and socio-economic marginalisation. Factors that contribute to their safety and survival include a sense of place, belonging and connectedness, and access to various tangible and intangible assets in their created spaces. We recommend further exploration of the mobilisation of assets to transform the quality of life and livelihood and to enhance the safety of the girl street children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Violence among youth is a major health and safety burden globally. There is a dearth in the development and evaluation of targeted interventions that addresses the multi-faceted nature of youth violence to ensure effectiveness and replicability. This study aims to systematically evaluate the fidelity of implementation of the Building Bridges Mentoring intervention that focuses on the prevention of youth violence in two low-income communities in South Africa. This study employed a mixed methods concurrent triangulation design. Qualitative data were analysed using deductive thematic analysis, and quantitative data using descriptive statistics and T-tests. The results indicate that for all the intervention components, implementation fidelity (i.e. adherence, exposure, quality of programme delivery, and participant responsiveness) was generally moderate to high, suggesting a 'good' implementation of the programme in the real world. Evaluating the fidelity of implementation is vital to obtain a comprehensive insight into whether an intervention was implemented according to its design, and to verify and validate the findings and outcomes, and accord credibility and integrity of the study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Departing from the position that critical African psychology is an endeavour whose objective is to harness psychological knowledge in, by, for, and with Africa, as well as the world, but also to critically think Africa into psychology, this article considers space as a key idea to consider in the further development of African psychology, and more specifically, a critically inclined African psychology. Taking critical African psychology as one of the orientations within Africa(n)-centred psychology, we argue for constructing and enlarging space so as to resist ruling epistemes in psychology in and of Africa and to create oppositional spaces that adduce alternative readings and makings of psychology-in-place. We outline three pathways, namely, (1) collective thinking and writing, (2) transdisciplinarity, and (3) affective community building, via which to realise and work from a critical African psychological position. These by no means exhaust all the pathways that can be charted by critical African psychologists and are instead offered as illustrations with which our collective has been engaging, thinking together, and experimenting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dynamic violence and injury prevention interventions located within community settings raise evaluation challenges by virtue of their complex structure, focus, and aims. They try to address many risk factors simultaneously, are often overlapped in their implementation, and their implementation may be phased over time. This article proposes a statistical and analytic framework for evaluating the effectiveness of multilevel, multisystem, multi-component, community-driven, dynamic interventions. The proposed framework builds on meta regression methodology and recently proposed approaches for pooling results from multi-component intervention studies. The methodology is applied to the evaluation of the effectiveness of South African community-centered injury prevention and safety promotion interventions. The proposed framework allows for complex interventions to be disaggregated into their constituent parts in order to extract their specific effects. The potential utility of the framework is successfully illustrated using contact crime data from select police stations in Johannesburg. The proposed framework and statistical guidelines proved to be useful to study the effectiveness of complex, dynamic, community-based interventions as a whole and of their components. The framework may help researchers and policy makers to adopt and study a specific methodology for evaluating the effectiveness of complex intervention programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Parenting plays an important role in the socialisation of children and youth, and ineffective parenting has been associated with multiple negative social and health outcomes among young people. Any attempt to design contextually relevant multi-system interventions to improve parenting practices and reduce negative child and adolescent outcomes must be based on an understanding of how contextual factors influence parenting practices. A phenomenological reflective lifeworld approach was utilised to explore parents' lived experiences of multiple intersecting socio-demographic factors and community social processes that impact on their parenting practices. This study was framed by social disorganisation theory rooted within an ecological framework. Using purposive sampling, data was collected from 47 parents comprising local residents and stakeholders (36 focus group participants and 7 individual interview participants) in a low-income community in Cape Town, South Africa, Thematic analysis of the qualitative data revealed various socio-demographic factors characteristic of community disorder that intersect with parenting and contributes to neglectful parenting. These factors include socio-economic disadvantage that leads to parental stress for predominantly single parent families, and a lack of formal and informal social control compounded by community disorder. This highlights the need for multi-level parenting interventions that address both community structural and social processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

South Africa's history of colonization, expressed particularly through the violent system of apartheid, calls for participatory approaches to research and practice that aim to decolonize knowledge construction, transform modes of community engagement, and address dominant power relations. This article reflects on how these challenges are addressed in the Spiritual Capacity and Religious Assets for Transforming Community Health through mobilising Males for Peace and Safety project in a low-income community in the Western Cape, South Africa. This analysis focuses on some of the possibilities and challenges relating to using community-based participatory research as a community engagement strategy for the purposes of enacting critical community psychology in an African context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The absence of a suitable measure to assess the health-related quality of life (HRQoL) of children and adolescents in South Africa, led to the use of the KIDSCREEN-52 questionnaire, which was developed and standardised in Europe. The current study is part of a broader study conducted in the Western Cape, which used the KIDSCREEN-52 to explore the influence of exposure to community violence on the subjective HRQoL of a sample of South African adolescents. This study aimed to investigate the reliability and construct validity of the KIDSCREEN-52 in a South African context. The broader study employed stratified interval criterion sampling to select 565 Grade 9 learners, aged 14-18. Participants were selected from six public schools in areas specified by the South African government as comprising key nodal areas in terms of crime in the Western Cape. The dataset for the current study comprised all participants (N = 565) of the primary study. As the initial step in validation of the KIDSCREEN-52 in South Africa, the current study examined its factor structure by means of exploratory factor analysis, using principal component analysis with oblimin rotations. It also assessed the internal consistency reliability of each of the scales, using Cronbach's alpha. Exploratory factor analysis extracted 10 factors as identified by previous studies, with some deviation in the loadings of the last three factors. Items of two scales ("Feelings" and "About Yourself") divided into three scales, and "Bullying" items were not sufficiently presented in the factor solution. Internal consistency of the measure was shown to be acceptable to good, with Cronbach's alpha values ranging from 0.76 to 0.81 for the 10 scales. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Exceptionally high levels of interpersonal violence have triggered a call by many experts for the need to determine effective ways to address the onset and effects of exposure to interpersonal violence. The specific aim of this study was to identify and draw on existing promising practices to make a more informed decision on strategies to develop a contextually relevant intervention that focused on the promotion of positive forms of masculinity to create safety and peace. This study used a qualitative meta-synthesis (QMS) technique to integrate and interpret findings from various intervention studies that focused on males and/or gender. An in-depth literature search yielded a total of 827 papers that met the search criteria. After removal of duplicates, abstract review, and review of the full texts, the subsequent sample for this meta-synthesis included 12 intervention programs and 23 studies. This QMS revealed the value of a comprehensive approach, using multiple strategies, employing participatory and interactive methods, and promoting social mobilization to address interpersonal violence. The promotion of positive forms of masculinity as an interpersonal violence prevention strategy is a much-needed, relatively untapped approach to generating safety and peace for both males and females. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]