South African Journal of Psychology

Rape prevention efforts are hampered by a chronic lack of adequate epidemiological and surveillance data. Information on identifying factors such as the who, when, where and how of rape is needed to inform the design of effective intervention programmes. Results from a demonstration Rape Surveillance Project show that records of rape cases presenting at three medico-legal clinics provide a valuable source for the epidemiological surveillance of rape. From January 1996 to December 1998 a surveillance questionnaire was completed for rape victims presenting at the Hillbrow, Lenasia South, and Chris Hani Baragwanath Medico-Legal Clinics in Gauteng. Analysis of the data suggests which women are most at risk for being raped, by whom they are raped, the areas where attacks most often occur, and the day and time when rapes are mostly committed. Despite the limited database and difficulties with generalizing findings beyond the three clinics, it is apparent that surveillance procedures have enormous import for sexual violence prevention and intervention. Implications for prevention strategies, aftercare, policy formulation, and future research are discussed. Methodological issues and institutional constraints are also discussed with a view to strengthening and developing such information management systems.

Heterosexual sexuality (heterosex) has been criticised for its central role in the reproduction of gender inequality and violence against women. This paper explores the way in which students draw on discourses of power and violence in their discussion of heterosexual relationships. The paper is based on a larger discourse analytic study of 17 focus groups and a free-association exercise carried out with psychology students at the University of the Western Cape. The paper highlights students' constructions of heterosexual relationships as bound up with power and violence. Significantly, resistance and challenge to such a status quo, particularly by women, are also evident.

The purpose of this study was to allow depressed women to tell their stories about depression. The epistemological framework was that of constructivism. The study involved a series of in-depth interviews with three depressed women with young children. Their stories provide an alternative reality to the traditional way of viewing depression. The major themes that emerged from the participants' stories seemed to be linked to the way in which they found themselves being pulled in opposite directions, ending up in a ‘no-win situation’, with the ‘stuckness’ maintaining the depression. The recurring themes centre around: Divided loyalties; failure to meet expectations; control; competence versus incompetence; love and rejection experienced by the ‘special child’; rootedness versus alienation; confrontation versus avoidance of issues and problems and; the role of support. The themes identified in this study may be helpful to those who work with depressed women in both a Western and African context.

This paper is an attempt to address the severe paucity in both South African and international literature concerning eating disordered behaviour in young ballet dancers. Allegations suggest that for decades a conspiratorial silence has been maintained in the dancing world around the eating disordered behaviours of performers. The only serious suggestions alluding to high levels of eating disordered behaviour among performers in South Africa have appeared anecdotally in the popular media. Previous international research has suggested that dancers could not possibly maintain their sylph-like physiques with the amount of energy expended in daily training and simultaneously adhere to healthy nutritional standards. In fact, some studies cite high levels of malnutrition amongst members of the dance community (Peterson, 1984). The current research study confirms these findings showing highly significant differences in the drive for thinness in dancers compared with normative adolescent samples. Results also indicate tendencies to interpersonal distrust which could explain why this sensitive behaviour has been so difficult to identify and treat in the past. More detailed statistical analyses show that this sample of adolescent dancers exhibit strong similarities with eating disordered individuals, both anorexic and bulimic. These results provide the evidence required by interested parties to intervene in the neglected nutrition and psychological health of dancers.

Burnout not only affects psychiatric nurses' ability to provide optimal patient care, but its consequences extend to the nurse's psychological and physical health. Couched in a cognitive-transactional model, the broad aim of the current study was to measure burnout levels for psychiatric nurses and to determine the respective roles of the environment and the individual on burnout levels. Burnout levels were measured using Maslach and Jackson's (1986) Burnout Inventory. Environmental variables measured included work load, collegial support, role conflict and role ambiguity. Finally, Antonovsky's (1987) sense of coherence (SOC) measured the characteristics of the individual. Although burnout levels were generally high, a low sense of personal accomplishment was particularly problematic. Emotional exhaustion and depersonalisation correlated significantly with all factors of the work environment and with the SOC. Personal accomplishment related only to role conflict. Multiple regression analyses showed the sense of coherence and work load to explain a large proportion of both emotional exhaustion and depersonalisation, and role conflict to explain a small but significant amount of the variance in personal accomplishment. Moderated multiple regression analyses added to a growing body of research pointing towards a possible direct effect of the SOC on burnout.

David Kolb has provided a detailed, useful and widely accepted theory of experiential learning and learning styles. He developed the Learning Styles Inventory (LSI) to assess four learning abilities and four learning styles. Kolb's work is viewed favourably for establishing the existence of individual differences in learning styles, but the major criticism against his work is focused on his method of measuring learning styles and more specifically on the psychometric properties of the LSI. The LSI is an ipsative instrument and the limitations placed on the statistical analysis of data of ipsative measures makes it inappropriate for reliability and validity evaluation of the instrument. In this study the psychometric properties of two normative measures of learning styles, a normative version of the LSI (referred to as the LSI-Likert) and the Learning Style Questionnaire (LSQ), are investigated. A review of the literature on the LSI is presented and the development of normative versions of the LSI is reviewed. First-year university students registered for either a science or human sciences degree completed the two normative instruments. The internal reliability of the four learning ability scales was determined using alpha coefficient. The internal reliability of the LSI-Likert and LSQ was found to be relatively high. The presence of a response bias for both instruments was suspected. It appeared that the LSI-Likert was more successful than the LSQ in differentiating learning abilities and styles in the sample used. Item factor analysis demonstrated two bipolar factors in line with Kolb's theory for the LSQ. The four-factor solution for the LSI-Likert produced four factors which to some extent represented the four learning abilities.