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This article considers the way in which high-end beauty services in Johannesburg use a particular notion of "Africa" to brand themselves. Globally, the beauty industry is designed around an idea of indulgence, with pampering posited as a means of self-care, survival and joy. Marketing for beauty destinations often draws on an Orientalist idea of the "mysterious east," invoking the stereotyped serenity of locations like Bali to offer bite-sized consumable contentment to clients. While it retains this focus on self-care as a practice of happiness, the burgeoning luxury industry in South Africa has seen the development of a new local aesthetic that treats the continent as an exotic landscape filled with healing plants and local wisdom. The article analyses the websites and physical salons of three high-end Johannesburg spas order to discuss their visual and textual representations of a mythic Africa as a site for luxury, indulgence and post-feminist self-care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Orientation: From the perspective of positive psychology, it is important to evaluate people's strengths. There is, however, a lack of validated measures for these purposes in many of the South African official languages. As language is a medium for cultural meanings, measures of mental health should be validated in the mother tongue of the people involved. Research purpose: The aim of this study was therefore to explore the psychometric properties of Setswana versions of three measures of psychological wellbeing, namely the Sense of Coherence Scale (SOC) (the 29-item version) (Antonovsky, 1987), Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS) (Diener, Emmons, Larson & Griffen, 1985) and Affectometer 2 (AFM) (Kammann & Flett, 1983). Research design, approach and method: A cross-sectional survey design was implemented for this study. Questionnaires were translated, back-translated and evaluated in a researchcommittee approach. A stratified sample of 738 Setswana-speaking participants completed the questionnaires in randomly selected sites of the North West province of South Africa as part of the multi-disciplinary Transition and Health during Urbanisation of South Africans project. Reliability indices, means, standard deviations, ranges of scores, patterns of correlations and factor structures were established for all the scales. Main findings: The present Setswana SWLS and AFM are reliable and valid for use in this group, as is, to some extent, the SOC. The factor structures of the three scales were also consistent with the latent factor structures of the original scales. Practical implications: These validated measures are instruments for use in the clinical, community and work contexts of Setswana-speaking people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the life map technique has been used in general social work practice for the past fourteen years, it has never been described or researched. The motivation for this study is to describe this technique. Given the extent of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in South Africa and globally, the technique was build into a social group work programme for young adults living with HIV/AIDS which was implemented in the Free State Province of South Africa. Following an experimental design and utilising a standardised measuring instrument, the general contentment of both the experimental and control groups was measured to evaluate the effectiveness of the programme. The experimental group's general contentment increased by 10.7%, while the control group's general contentment decreased by 1.3%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following Amartya Sen, this paper contends that the capability approach provides a better framework for thinking about human well-being and development than more traditional approaches which typically focus on utility or resources. This is illustrated by drawing on the results of a survey which investigated how ordinary people in South Africa view human well-being (a ‘good’ form of life). However, the results of this exercise indicate that the capability approach overlaps with both utility (happiness, pleasure, etc) and resource-based concepts of well-being. The distinctions between commodities (and their characteristics), human functioning and utility is less robust than Sen implies. In particular, the capability approach needs to make more space for the role of utility (defined broadly to include all valuable mental states) and say more about the material basis of well-being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Field survey studies undertaken in Nigeria, Korea, China and India explored the way inner-age satisfaction is experienced in those culturally diverse societies. Chronologically 20 to 59 year old respondents' inner-age satisfaction was gauged as the average difference between feel, look, do, and interest cognitive (self-perceived) and desired (ideal) inner-age dimensions. Analyses of covariance (with chronological age factored out) across the four nations showed Nigeria to differ significantly in terms of inner-age satisfaction from each Asian population, contrary to the Asian societies where no differences were found across samples (except between Korea and India where inner-age satisfaction differed at a p .05). High levels of satisfaction with inner-age (coming about when cognitive and desired ages are equal) commonly transpired: 31.4 per cent of Indian, 36.9 per cent of Nigerian, 44.3 per cent of Chinese, and 44.9 per cent of Korean respondents. Age dissatisfaction in an elder direction (ideal age older than self-perceived age) was atypical and happened most often among Nigerian (23.4 per cent) and least among Korean subjects (10.7 per cent). In contrast, wishing for a younger innerage was a commonplace phenomenon in India (50.6 per cent of the sample), as well as in China where it occurred the least (36.6 per cent). The study's findings imply the universal nature of the way human beings (irrespective of culture) perceive and feel about inner-age, as well as the potential of an inner-age satisfaction psychographic as a relevant consumer behavior segmentation trait for marketing planners of age-sensitive products and services who seek to standardize their global branding and distribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]