UVicSpace | Institutional Repository
UVicSpace is the University of Victoria’s open access scholarship and learning repository. It preserves and provides access to the digital scholarly works of UVic faculty, students, staff, and partners. Items in UVicSpace are organized into collections, each belonging to a community.
For more information about depositing items, see the Submission Guidelines.
Recent Submissions
Health and homelessness: a landscape of living death
(2000) Sansom, Anthony; McCann, L. D.
This thesis reports the results of a research project designed to investigate the health and health care experiences of street people living in Victoria, British Columbia. Previous geographical research has addressed many facts of the street community but the health of this group has received little attention. However, recent directions in medical geography and the geography of homelessness, including the use of structuration theory, provide the framework for exploring how the street community experiences and perceives health in the landscape. The research is based on data collected through semistructured interviews in 1995, street journals and elite interviews in 1999, and document surveys. All data were analysed and five major themes were identified. First, Becoming Homeless includes the causes leading to living on the streets. Second, Existing on the Streets incorporates daily activities and the conditions of street life, and how they relate to health. Third, Street Community Facilities and Services refer to the attitudes of the street people towards these facilities in addition to their function and purpose in the street community. Fourth, Street Health examines the health concerns of this group, along with accessing and utilizing health care. Finally, Personal Empowerment and Getting off the Streets considers the measures needed for street people to improve their health and their lives. It was found that the street community's interpretation and experiences of health were shaped by the landscape. This landscape can best be described as a pathological landscape, in particular, a landscape of living death. Policy recommendations are mentioned, along with suggestions for future research.
The social ecology of Malawi orphans
(1999) Okumu, Christopher; Cook, Philip
This is a study of HIV/ AIDS orphans in Malawi. Malawi is one of the poorest countries in the world but with one of the highest HIV seroprevalence. Peace Corps (1998) approximates that 13% of the Malawi population are infected with HIV/AIDS. All Africa News Agency (AANA) states that as of June 1998 there were over 600,000 orphans in Malawi. This is a doubling in three years of the 300,000 number reported in 1995. This study used a descriptive research design to outline the social environment of Malawi orphans using Bronfenbrenner's (I 979) Socio-ecological Perspective and Erikson's (1997) Life Cycle frameworks. The study used archival data from the Malawi project "Starting from Strengths" 1996-1998. The research methodology for the study was Content Analysis within the critical social science paradigm. The question in this research is "Who are the prominent individuals and institutions in the "social ecology" (Bronfenbrenner 1979) of orphans in Malawi and what is their impact on the development of these orphan-children?" The unveiling of the identity of individuals and institutions active in the social environment of Malawi orphans exposed the orphan-care social network and the key problems affecting orphan care in Malawi today. Orphans in patrilineal Malawi were found to be more "at risk" than those in the matrilineal cultural setting due to the differences in: the ages of care providers, the access to inheritance, and the prevalence of polygamy in the patrilineal cultural setting. Advocacy work for Malawi orphans grounded on the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) is one intervention strategy that can empower orphan-families to take ownership of the fight against the HIV/ AIDS carnage. This study provides the leadership that is urgently needed in the fight to mitigate the plight of HIV/ AIDS orphans in Malawi and elsewhere and provides the stepping stone from which to launch future ecological studies.
Answering the call: the processes of developing the social work identity
(2002) Noakes, Susan Anne; Armitage, Andrew
Using grounded theory, I explored the processes that a social worker goes through in developing his or her identity. I interviewed 12 participants who possessed a Bachelor of Social Work and/or a Master of Social Work degree and identified the basic social process of Answering the Call. Answering the Call includes three categories that the social worker assumes in taking on the identity: Entering the Identity, Making Meaning of the Identity and Owning the Identity. The social worker, furthermore, might reenter the identity and again go through the processes of developing the identity. Understanding how a social worker builds his or her identity can provide some necessary insight to social work employers, educators and social workers in general on how to support the members of this poorly understood and maligned profession.
Childbearing after age 30
(2000) MacNeill, Lindy Marie; Wu, Zheng
Throughout much of the developed world, increasing numbers of women are delaying their entry into motherhood. While Canada has experienced an overall decline in its fertility rate, the rate for women between the ages of 30 and 39 has actually increased over the past thirty years or so. Further, of all first-births in Canada in 1997, 31 % were to mothers over the age of 30, up from 7% in 1971. By examining women who were childless at age 30, I assess the pattern and determinants of delayed childbearing among women aged 30 and older, and test a number of hypotheses based upon three exploratory perspectives that may explain this phenomenon. While I focus on the effects of education and employment, I also include a number of other independent variables that impact delayed childbearing, including marital status, cohort and the presence of step-/adopted children in the family before and after age 30. The results suggest that both school enrolment and employment tend to reduce the odds of a woman becoming a mother after age 30, while level of education increases the likelihood. A significant interaction effect exists between education and employment, which may indicate that that how a woman utilizes her education determines how employment affects her chances of becoming a mother. I also briefly discuss the implications of this study for future research, policy makers and employers, women considering delaying motherhood and their children.
The social organization of power in the academy's disability policy: chronic illness, academic accommodation and "equity"
(2000) Jung, Karen Elizabeth; Carroll, William K.
Using an institutional ethnographic approach, I explore the everyday experience of women students who are disabled by chronic illness in order to discover how disability policies - which aim at improving accessibility and providing academic accommodation for disabled students - accomplish their purposes. Starting from women student's own accounts of their experiences, and tracing the practices of policy implementation, I analyse and explicate the social relations that structure the university's disability policy for accommodating disabled students. Normally understood as the university acting "in the interests of students with disabilities", I show that the disability policy intends an institutional course of action that accomplishes, accountably, the university's legal obligation not to discriminate against students with disabilities. I argue, however, that as students claim disability in order to gain access to needed assistance and services, they also become subjected to institutional processes ' that may (dis)organize their future student and graduate careers.