Don Foster

Inherent and Organisational Stress in the SAPS: An Empirical Survey in the Western Cape

Police work has been identified as a stressful occupation. Considered in the context of the South African (SA) situation, the paucity of research on the topic is cause for concern. This paper reports a preliminary exploration of stress in the South African Police Service (SAPS). Ninety-one SAPS members in the Cape Peninsula completed a questionnaire consisting of (i) Spielbergers 60-item Police Stress Survey (Spielberger, Westbury, Grier & Greenfield, 1981), and (ii) a 12-item Likert scale identifying potentially stressful areas specific to the South African context. Results show the SA sample to evidence a greater degree of stress than a USA sample. Results indicate that the way In which the police organisation operates in SA creates stress additional to the inherent pressure already existing as a result of the nature of police work. This finding indicates a potential area of intervention, and also shows that further research could profitably be conducted.

Hegemonic masculine conceptualisation in gang culture

This research sought to investigate the relationship between gang processes and differing forms of masculine expression. Three hundred and sixteen male participants, drawn from secondary schools within Cape Town, were included in the study. These schools were in areas differentially characterised by gang activity. The questionnaire included the newly devised Male Attitude Norm Inventory designed to explore hegemonic conceptualisations of masculinity. Factor analytic procedures rendered a three-factor model stressing the importance of male toughness, success and control. Through a series of t-tests for independent samples, as well as supporting qualitative data, participants from areas characterised by high gang activity were found to support these hegemonic elements to a significantly greater extent.

Tolerance of ambiguity as a content specific construct

Abstract Despite a lack of definitive evidence, tolerance of ambiguity has most often been treated as a generalized personality trait. In this paper we propose a measure of ambiguity tolerance (Attitudinal Ambiguity Tolerance scale) which can test the assumptions of generality by assessing cross-content variability. The validity and reliability of the Attitudinal Ambiguity Tolerance scale were found to be adequate. The results indicate that tolerance of ambiguity is not a generalized personality trait, but rather, that expressions of ambiguity tolerance are content specific. The findings suggest that, in comparison to the Attitudinal Ambiguity Tolerance scale, personality measures may be inaccurate predictors of ambiguity tolerance in specific content domains.

‘Race’ and Racism in South African Psychology

In this paper the author sketches how the issues of ‘race’ and racism have been taken up on the psychological terrain in South Africa over the past century. Racism manifested as both segregation and inequality in mental health provisions, and was actively promoted by leading psychologists. Psychologists on the other side of a political divide however turned attention to analysis of race relations mainly through the study of prejudice. Three areas of research are reviewed. While some useful findings have emerged, certain criticisms may be directed against this liberal framework of ‘race’ as prejudice.

Negotiating risky bodies: childbirth and constructions of risk

Policy makers, practitioners and researchers have identified risk as a key concept in relation to maternity care and childbirth. There is however a lack of research exploring women’s discursive constructions of risk and childbirth in relation to sociological risk theories. In this article we explore pregnant women’s everyday negotiations of risk in relation to the self-chosen plan to birth either at home or via an elective Caesarean section. We use sociocultural risk theories to contextualise our findings. This article draws on data from a study conducted in 2005–2006 in which we interviewed 24 pregnant middle-class South African women who were planning a home birth or elective Caesarean section and used social constructionist discourse analysis to analyse the data. We found that women’s risk constructions were related to three different conceptions of birthing embodiment: technocratic bodies, vulnerable bodies and knowing bodies. Women who planned Caesarean sections were committed to biomedical constructions of risk and birth. Woman who planned home births shifted between endorsing and subverting biomedical models of risk. They also resisted definitions of birthing bodies as inherently abject (unclean, polluting, unruly) and constructed the process of giving birth as risky in medicalised settings. In such settings, the birthing body was constructed as vulnerable to objectification, loss of dignity and shaming. Women who planned to give birth at home constructed an alternative approach to birth which emphasised embodied ways of knowing, relational connection and empowerment over normative and medicalised risk constructions. In the process, biomedical risk definitions were destabilised.

Gender and hedging: from sex differences to situated practice.

In a reanalysis of womens language, Holmes (1995) has argued that womens use of hedges expresses interpersonal warmth and not, as many researchers have maintained, linguistic tentativeness. It is typically men, she suggests, who employ hedges to convey imprecision and incertitude. In this study, we investigated the use of the hedges sort of and you know in a sample of South African students. Holmess method of analysis was applied to hedging behavior in 52 dyadic conversations. The study consisted of a 2 (Speaker Gender: Male/Female) × 2 (Audience Gender: Male/Female) × 2 (Condition: Competitive/Noncompetitive) between-subjects experimental design. The results showed that contextual influences eclipsed the effects of gender; in fact, no main effects were found for speaker gender. Fewer hedges were deployed in the competitive condition than in the noncompetitive condition. Moreover, perhaps reflecting differences in social status, both sexes used sort of to express tentativeness more frequently when talking to male addressees. When speaking to female addressees, on the other hand, men deployed facilitative you know hedges more readily than women.

Historical trends in South African race attitudes

This article presents an historical survey of intergroup attitudes in South Africa, tracing social distance scores back to 1934 and semantic differential scores back to 1975. We compare the attitudes of different race groups towards each other over time by standardizing the scores from different historical periods on a common metric. This enables us to pursue two lines of investigation: (1) to chart the effect that racial classification has had on ingroup bias patterns, and (2) to assess the impact of changing historical contexts on intergroup attitudes — especially the threatening and competitive context of the post-1976 struggle for liberation and the post-1994 context of democracy and reconciliation. The data indicate that dramatic changes may be taking place, with white respondents showing declining levels of prejudice, the inversion of the historically asymmetric attitude ‘colour bar’, and a slight, perhaps negative, change in attitudes of black African respondents toward other groups.

Images of culture and mental illness : South African psychiatric approaches

This article considers ways in which the relationship between culture and mental illness is presented in some prominent South African psychiatric literature. We argue that ‘culture’ is often chosen for study for pragmatic reasons, and because the term has considerable currency both in South Africa and in mainstream psychiatry. Four major approaches situated within both interpretive and positivist models are discussed. Common to all of these is a view of ‘Black culture’ as an organic, archaic essence which is contrasted with the fragmented alienated ‘Western culture’. This view seems to dovetail neatly with dominant South African ideology, and is apparently related to a Romantic conception of the primitive. Political issues are generally ignored in the psychiatric literature. We suggest that a more critical approach to ‘Black culture’ and psychiatry is a prerequisite for an adequate contextualization of mental illness.

The Construction of Gender: An Analysis of Men's Talk on Gender

The construction of gender and gender interactions is examined through the discourse of mens only groups. Two discourses are identified: Gender as Social Norm and Gender as Natural. These discourse can be seen, through rhetorical strategies, to construct gender in ways that are problematic for women. Of particular concern is the finding that the discourses and explanations used to construct gender generally are the same as those used to explain, and justify, gender aggression. This finding and some of its implications are discussed.

The Role of Speech Accommodation and Crime Type in Attribution of Guilt

Abstract In this experiment we examined the attribution of guilt as a function of speech accommodation and crime type. The subjects (129 White, English-speaking, South African students) listened to tape-recorded exchanges between a Coloured, Cape Afrikaans-speaking criminal suspect and a White, English-speaking interrogator. The subjects were asked to rate the suspect on a 7-point scale ranging from innocent (7) to guilty (1). The independent variables were (a) type of language shift (convergence, partial divergence, complete divergence) and (b) type of crime (blue-collar, white-collar). As we predicted (based on speech accommodation theory), the suspects who converged into English were rated as significantly less guilty than those who diverged into Cape Afrikaans. Furthermore, the suspects accused of blue-collar crimes were more often deemed guilty than were those accused of white-collar crimes (cf. Seggie, 1983).