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Background: Depression contributes substantially to the burden of disease in South Africa. Little is known about how neighbourhoods affect the mental health of the people living in them. Methods: Using nationally representative data (N=11,955) from the South African National Income Dynamics Study and the South African Indices of Multiple Deprivation (SAIMD) modelled at small-area level, this study tested associations between neighbourhood-level deprivation and depression, after controlling for individual-level covariates. Results: Results showed a significant positive association between neighbourhood-level deprivation and depression using the composite SAIMD (β = 0.31 (0.15); p=0.04) as well as the separate deprivation domains. Living environment deprivation (β =0.53 (0.16); p=0.001) and employment deprivation (β = 0.38 (0.13); p=0.004), respectively, were the two most salient domains in predicting this relationship. Conclusions: Findings supported the hypothesis that there is a positive association between living in a more deprived neighbourhood and depression, even after controlling for individual-level covariates. This study suggests that alleviating structural poverty could reduce the burden of depression in South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rationale Little research has evaluated the life course drivers of cognitive aging in South Africa. Objectives We investigated the relationships of self-rated childhood health and father's occupation during childhood with later-life cognitive function score and whether educational attainment mediated these relationships among older South Africans living in a former region of Apartheid-era racial segregation. Methods Data were from baseline assessments of “Health and Aging in Africa: A Longitudinal Study of an INDEPTH Community” (HAALSI), a population-based study of 5059 men and women aged ≥40 years in 2015 in rural Agincourt sub-district, South Africa. Childhood health, father's occupation during childhood, and years of education were self-reported in study interviews. Cognitive measures assessed time orientation, numeracy, and word recall, which were included in a z-standardized latent cognitive function score variable. Linear regression models adjusted for age, sex, and country of birth were used to estimate the total and direct effects of each childhood risk factor, and the indirect effects mediated by years of education. Results Poor childhood health predicted lower cognitive scores (total effect = −0.28; 95% CI = −0.35, −0.21, versus good); this effect was not mediated by educational attainment. Having a father in a professional job during childhood, while rare (3% of sample), predicted better cognitive scores (total effect = 0.25; 95% CI = 0.10, 0.40, versus unskilled manual labor, 29% of sample). Half of this effect was mediated by educational attainment. Education was linearly associated with later-life cognitive function score (0.09; 95% CI = 0.09, 0.10 per year achieved). Conclusion In this post-Apartheid, rural South African context, older adults with poor self-reported childhood health or whose father worked in unskilled manual labor had relatively poor cognitive outcomes. Educational attainment strongly predicted cognitive outcomes, and appeared to be, in part, a mechanism of social stratification in later-life cognitive health in this context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many of the people who are most vulnerable to the effects of poverty and deprivation reside in informal settlements in Africa. While there is growing evidence of the importance of family resilience, there is little documented evidence of how collective actions undertaken by families in African communities can contribute to this. In-depth interviews and focus-group sessions were conducted with single mothers residing in an informal settlement in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa to delineate the factors that contributed to their resilience. We examined the influence of social ties, self-efficacy and networks they had established beyond their immediate community on enhancing family resilience. Three key themes are discussed: determination to survive, rising above harsh economic conditions and establishing networks within and outside the community. We conclude that the foundation for building strong female-headed families lies in positive social ties, self-empowerment initiatives and tapping on established networks within and outside low income communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Viewed in the context of an older-growing population, pressure on health-care and social (family and community) resources, and a perceived changed intergenerational ‘care contract’, relationships are often the only avenue open to address the care needs of both older and younger generations in economically deprived environments. This study explored how empathy manifested in the care experiences of older people (8 women and 1 man, aged between 60 and 85 years) in relation to middle adolescents (aged 16 years and younger). Empathy is proposed as an essential quality that can benefit care in any relationship, and indications of this were obtained by applying the Mmogo-method®, a projective visual data collection method. Textual data were analysed thematically, and visual data were analysed using Roos and Redelinghuys’ method of analysis. Findings indicated that older people viewed the relational interactions from a self-centred perspective and in a linear manner, referred to mid-adolescents in judgemental terms, and expressed conditional acceptance of these younger people. The findings indicated the antithesis (the opposite) of empathy, with the implication that older people might not give or elicit empathy in relation to younger people, particularly when the latter reach independence and exercise their autonomy. A lack of giving and receiving empathy holds serious implications for the future care needs of older people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a spatial analysis of multiple deprivation in South Africa and demonstrates that the most deprived areas in the country are located in the rural former homeland areas. The analysis is undertaken using the datazone level South African Index of Multiple Deprivation which was constructed from the 2001 Census. Datazones are a new statistical geography designed especially for this Index using techniques developed in the United Kingdom. They are smaller in population size than wards, enabling fine-grained spatial analysis of deprivation across the whole of South Africa. The spatial scale used is the smallest to be used in a developing country to date. Levels of deprivation are compared between former homeland areas as a whole, the rest of South Africa and a case-study township, as well as between each former homeland. Individual dimensions of deprivation and an overall composite measure are presented. Municipality-level analysis shows that this spatial pattern of multiple deprivation continued to persist in 2007, demonstrating the ongoing spatial legacy of apartheid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is based on a 12 week New Beginnings group intervention for mothers and their infants in a shelter in Johannesburg, South Africa. Contextual deprivation loomed large in the therapeutic encounter and preoccupied both participants and therapists. At times, this preoccupation hindered the participants' and therapists' capacity for reflective functioning. This paper argues that contextual deprivation functioned at times as an anti-analytic third in the therapeutic process, interfering with thoughtfulness. A close reading of the beginning of two consecutive sessions that took place toward the end of the intervention reveals how central deprivation was and how, through the therapeutic group process and the therapists' working through of challenging countertransferential material, the rigidity of deprivation in the minds of the therapists and group members was shifted. Although the contextual deprivation remained unchanged, there appeared to be more capacity for flexibility in thinking about it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The violent attacks on African immigrants and refugees in marginal settlements surrounding South Africa's largest cities in May 2008 occasioned a rush of mostly well-intentioned attempts by journalists, public intellectuals, and government officials to discover the causes and find the cures for the outbreak. This article interrogates the glosses of 'xenophobia' and 'social deprivation' that were all too quickly applied to explain the attacks in public representations of this sorry episode in South Africa's post-apartheid history. The account of the focal events is based on a thorough sifting of press reports, victims', perpetrators', and police testimonies, government and civil society spokespersons' interventions, and field research. Rather than providing a monovocal, hierarchical argument for one or another analysis emerging from the reportage, this article juxtaposes complex and conflicting local accounts, justifications, forces, and circumstances, to provide an intriguing if ultimately - at this early stage - irresolvable image of these tragic events. The implications for South African social identities, institutions, and democratic order, however, are at the end all too clearly illuminated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social anthropologists working in South Africa during the late apartheid period expressed their abhorrence of the apartheid system in the preamble to the association that they formed. Many set as their goal the work of ‘exposé anthropology’, using anthropology to reveal the iniquitous consequences of apartheid. Apartheid's formal collapse and the institution of a democratic constitutional regime has reduced the need for such exposé, but current political-economic circumstances preclude easy or rapid transformation of the extreme poverty and deprivation that continue to plague the country's population. The article addresses the question of what an appropriate ethics for anthropology in such circumstances might be and proposes an ethic of care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article investigates the differential effect of cognitive and affective group relative deprivation on protest orientation among Indian South African adults. Several theorists have maintained that a key factor in generating political and social protest is a sense of relative deprivation. The term relative deprivation was first used by Stouffer and his colleagues in reference to the findings of a large-scale socio-psychological study of the U.S. army during the Second World War, but Runciman was the first to formalize some of the important issues related to this concept. The term relative deprivation is generally used to describe discontent stemming from the belief that one is getting less than one is entitled to. The results of the present study indicate that Indians were sympathetic to South African Blacks' position of deprivation. The independent variable that explained the greatest proportion of variance for protest orientation was Factor 1 Blacks, which comprised Indian South Africans' anger, frustration. anxiety/worry. and dissatisfaction when they considered the position of Blacks.

The article examines the relationship between relative deprivation, ethnic identification and racial attitudes using the sociopolitical and economic changes in South Africa as background. The relationship between relative deprivation, ethnic identification, and racial attitudes was investigated in random samples of 460 Whites and 466 Blacks on the eve of a new political dispensation in South Africa. Measurements of relative deprivation were obtained with regard to the social, financial, political, and work situation. Regression analyses indicated that the strongest predictors of White attitudes toward Blacks were work-related deprivation and ethnic identification. Other predictors were gender and educational qualifications. Political and social relative deprivation, attitudes toward the in-group, income, and gender influenced Black attitudes toward Whites. The results of the study are explained against the background of sociopolitical and economic changes in South Africa. The results obtained in the present study apply only to situations with unambiguous stimuli. The conflicting results in the literature on age and conformity may well be resolved when this one factor of ambiguity is taken into account. It remains unclear whether maximum conformity is obtained with ambiguous stimuli just before adolescence.