Browsing by Subject "Development Studies and Social Transformation"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Open Access
    A study of young volunteers and volunteering in a Cape Town based, international NGO
    (2005) Wiik, Nina H; Jubber, Ken
    What motivates a group of young people from a disadvantaged community spend between 20 and 50 hours every week in a voluntary organisation in their area? This dissertation has studied young volunteers aged between 18 and 28, who are working in a non-govemmental organisation (NGO) operating in a disadvantaged local community on the Cape Flats in Cape Town, South Africa. The aim of this research was to gain knowledge of their motivations for being full-time volunteers for this NGO. This is a qualitative, ethnographic study, which seeks to provide information about the young volunteers and volunteering in a descriptive way. The methods used for data collection have been participative observation, interviews, personal conversations, drawings of social network maps and a questionnaire. The numbers of interviewees are 12 in total, viz. ll volunteers and the Manager of the NGO. Clary et al (1992) created an empirical instrument that can be used to map out an individual's reasons for volunteering, namely the 'volunteers function inventory' (VFI), which suggest 6 main motivations for volunteering. This functional approach for studying motivation applies to volunteers in high-risk communities because it relates the individual’s psychological functions to his/her experiences, current life situation and stage of development. The data analysis in this study indicates that there are several motivations at stake, which can operate at the same time as well as change over time. In Cole's recent study (2004), she found that there does not appear to be any one motivational reason for volunteering. People do volunteer work for different reasons, but for volunteers from high-risk communities, values are very important motivators: "I feel compassion toward people in need" seems to apply to the majority of the volunteers who participated in this study. In addition to value based motivations for volunteering, the following three motivations are to be found in this group of 11 volunteers: the social benefits of volunteering, the personal development of being a volunteer and, last but not least, the love for the work they are doing.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Open Access
    Visual and textual representations of childhood by the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), 1999 to 2003
    (2004) Stevens, Allison
    The objective of this paper is to investigate how UNICEF (the United Nations Children's Fund) represents the notion of childhood. A content analysis of 690 photographs as well as an in-depth textual analysis of the most authoritative publications is conducted to decode childhood representations. The methodological approaches are both quantitative (content analysis) and qualitative (textual analysis). The photographic and publications data are obtained from the UNICEF website for the period 1999 to 2003. Inscribed in the visual images are historical western notions of childhood as a blissful stage of life in which passivity and vulnerability are featured. These inscriptions are rooted in technologies of scientific knowledge and myths, which explains therefore their persuasiveness. As regards arguments that development institutions export ideal notions of childhood specific only to western societies, the paper finds that while such ideals certainly are present in the representations, the proper ideal is by no means the sole embodiment of exported notions. Over the last five years, UNICEF has begun to incorporate new views of children as socially competent, valuable social actors in their own right (a school of thought that has begun to be theorised, most notably, by the 'New Sociology of Childhood'). However, the ideas of children as social actors attains a particular meaning in UNICEF texts. Many instances of children's strength and resiliency in third worlds are not represented as constitutive of what the idea of child agency means.