Research Articles (Psychology)

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https://hdl.handle.net/10566/396

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Browsing by Author "Bawa, Umesh"

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    Clinical psychology training in South Africa: a call to action
    (Sage Publications, 2013) Pillay, Anthony; Ahmed, Rashid; Bawa, Umesh
    With the profession of clinical psychology and its formal training programmes less than 40 years old in South Africa, it is important that efforts are made to critically examine its challenges and the extent to which it is meeting the prevailing mental health needs. The profession has gone through a chequered history in South Africa and needs to look at how it realigns its goals and practices, to be in tune with the imperatives of democracy, and to ensure that mental health benefits accrue to all of the country’s people, rather than a minority. To this end, the authors examine training issues, such as recruitment, curricula, and future directions. We assert that a clinical psychology that draws from current resources and foregrounds a primary health-care orientation can start to address some of the challenges facing training in South Africa.
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    Gender patterns in the contribution of different types of violence to posttraumatic stress symptoms among South African urban youth
    (Elsevier, 2013) Kaminer, Debra; Hardy, Anneli; Heath, Katherine; Mosdell, Jill; Bawa, Umesh
    OBJECTIVE: Identifying the comparative contributions of different forms of violence exposure to trauma sequelae can help to prioritize interventions for polyvictimized youth living in contexts of limited mental health resources. This study aimed to establish gender patterns in the independent and comparative contributions of five types of violence exposure to the severity of posttraumatic stress symptoms among Xhosa-speaking South African adolescents. METHOD: Xhosa-speaking adolescents (n = 230) attending a high school in a low-income urban community in South Africa completed measures of violence exposure and posttraumatic stress symptoms. RESULTS: While witnessing of community violence was by far the most common form of violence exposure, for the sample as a whole only sexual victimization and being a direct victim of community violence, together with gender, contributed independently to the severity of posttraumatic stress symptoms. When the contribution of different forms of violence was examined separately for each gender, only increased exposure to community and sexual victimization were associated with symptom severity among girls, while increased exposure to direct victimization in both the community and domestic settings were associated with greater symptom severity in boys. CONCLUSIONS: The findings provide some preliminary motivation for focusing trauma intervention initiatives in this community on girls who have experienced sexual abuse compounded by victimization in the community, and boys who have been direct victims of either domestic or community violence. Further research is required to establish whether the risk factors for posttraumatic stress symptoms identified among adolescents in this study are consistent across different communities in South Africa, as well as across other resource-constrained contexts.
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    Visually negotiating hegemonic discourse through Photovoice: Understanding youth representations of safety
    (SAGE Publications, 2018) Malherbe, Nick; Suffla, Shahnaaz; Seedat, Mohamed; Bawa, Umesh
    Despite the immense communicative potential of visual methodologies, surprisingly few community-based research studies have meaningfully considered participants’ visual meaning-making processes. When working with youth participants from contexts with which researchers are unfamiliar, the use of visual methodologies and analyses is able to transcend much of the developmental and cultural barriers to communication that are inherent in many linguistically focused research methods. By employing a visual discourse analysis on six photographs captured by Ethiopian youth in a Multi-Country Photovoice Project on youth representations of safety, this study aims to showcase the value of analysing participants’ use of ‘alternative’ visual discourses. It was found that participants drew predominantly on two discourses, Humanising Capital and Unity, both of which resisted a number of Western hegemonic discourses surrounding youth constructions of safety. Participants’ visual constructions served as a meaningful mode of communication, as well as a relevant approach to facilitating youth ownership of meaning-making processes within community-based research.