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Mapping evidence on parents’ experiences of cross-racial adoption in South Africa: a scoping review.
(2024) Coertze, Alicia.; Madlabana-Luthuli, Cynthia Zandile.
Introduction: Due to South Africa's Apartheid history, cross-racial adoption only became legal in 1991 (Schröder, 2015). Research in South Africa has explored the reasons behind cross racial adoption, the identity formation of adoptees, and the challenges faced by adoptive parents (Hall, 2010; Schröder, 2015; Finlay, 2006; Jackson, 2018). International studies have also examined the experiences of black children raised by white families (Caballero et al., 2008; Samuels, 2009). However, research gaps still exist, necessitating further exploration of this emerging phenomenon in South Africa. The current study examined cross-racial adoption within the South African context. The study mapped and synthesised evidence on parents’ experiences of cross-racial adoption in South Africa. Methods and Analysis: An overview of the current literature in this research area was compiled through a scoping review. The PRISMA-ScR flow diagram was utilised to meticulously screen the data, following specified inclusion and exclusion criteria. A search across relevant databases yielded ten studies that were ultimately included in the final analysis.
Results and Discussion: The data were charted in table form and summarised by: (1) Author(s) and date, (2) study title, (3) aims of the study, (4) study design, (6) population, (7) most relevant findings and (8) study limitations. A thematic analysis was used to analyse the gaps and trends in the literature to create a narrative interpretation of what was already written. Six themes emerged from the ten studies included in the review: (1) Parents' motivations and reasons to adopt cross-racially, (2) parental experiences of the pre-adoption process, (3) parental experiences of specific cross-racial adoption constructs, (4) challenges faced by cross-racial adoption parents, (5) opportunities and positive experiences faced by parents and (6) strategies that can be applied or that should be considered to minimise the adverse effects of cross-racial adoption.
Conclusion and Recommendations: The scoping review highlighted significant gaps in the literature on transracial adoption, particularly the underrepresentation of adoptees' perspectives, especially in South Africa. Future research should focus on the long-term psychosocial impacts on adoptees, the motivations of men and same-sex couples in adoption, and the experiences of families who did not proceed with adoption due to obstacles.
Mapping emotional coping interventions for health care providers: a scoping review.
(2024) Andrew, Alison Teneal.; Petrus, Ruwayda.; Madlabana, Cynthia Zandile.
Background: Primary Health Care (PHC) nurses in low and middle-income countries (LMICs) such as South Africa, are confronted by socio-economic inequalities that impact their health and well-being, and capacity to provide person-centred care (PCC). Concurrently, the organisational/system changes amplified pre-existing emotional strain (i.e., burnout, stress, and compassion fatigue). Through the driving of PCC, Human Resources for Health (HRH) strategies, the implementation of National Health Insurance (NHI) plan and re-engineering of PHC which aim to meet the global health care sector standards. The delivery of emotional coping skill interventions capacitates PHC nurses to cope and provide optimum PCC in PHC. This scoping review focused on broadly reviewing emotional coping skill interventions for health care providers in LMICs. Subsequently, the findings were refined to infer knowledge on building emotional coping skills interventions, particularly for PHC nurses in the South African context.
Purpose: To map emotional coping skills interventions for health care providers within LMICs to improve the well-being of the PHC nurses to provide optimum care in PHC. Methods and Analysis: The Arksey and O'Malley’s framework scoping review was used to map evidence on emotional coping skills interventions for health care providers (i.e., nurses) within LMICs. Furthermore, the PRISMA-SCR flowchart and checklist were utilised to depict the search strategy. A narrative review approach was utilised to chart the data, and the database search was recorded as follows; author(s) & year of publication, study location (country), aims and objectives of the study, methodology, study population, intervention type, duration of the intervention, outcome measures, key findings, and limitations. Data were thematically analysed and guided by the Thomas and Harden (2008) thematic framework to identify trends and gaps.
Findings: The review distilled 5 eligible articles, published between the years 2015 to 2018. The findings revealed two major themes set by the study's research objectives. Theme 1revealed a gap for context-specific interventions as there was a myriad of factors specific to the South African health care sector to be accounted for in the curation of interventions and a paucity of primary research on emotional coping skill interventions to cope with the adverse “people work” (i.e., burnout, stress, and compassion fatigue). Theme 2 revealed factors that contributed to improved well-being namely, education and training, communication, debriefing/venting, religion and spirituality, social support, humour, and duration of
interventions and working hours.
Conclusion and Recommendations: The findings of the scoping review substantiate that emotional coping skill interventions exist in LMICs and are beneficial to the well-being of PHC nurses. From an organisational perspective, the findings demonstrate that the existing interventions propose a basis for future emotional coping skill interventions for PHC nurses to be capacitated with the necessary tools to cope. In addition, further primary research is required to propose a South African context of standard of best practice to shape subsequent interventions.
Exploring constructions of masculinities and their influence on sexual practice, HIV risk and health-seeking behaviours of men in Malukazi/Malagazi informal settlement in Durban.
(2025) Ngcobo, Seluleko Eric.; Govender, Kaymarlin.; Dageid, Wenche.
Introduction: This study explores the role masculinity plays in shaping HIV-related risks and the health-seeking behaviours of young men residing in Malukazi, an informal settlement located in Durban, South Africa. Traditional notions of masculinity often influence health behaviours, including perceptions of HIV-related risk and healthcare utilisation. Understanding the intersection between masculinity and HIV-related risks and health-seeking behaviours is crucial for the development of targeted context-specific interventions meant to address the HIV epidemic among young men in informal settlements of South Africa.
Methods: The study adopted a qualitative approach, which involved in-depth interviews faceto-face and focus-group discussions with 23 young men aged 15-25 from Malukazi. Three focus group discussions (FGD) and 17 individual interviews (IDI) were conducted. Thematic analysis was employed to analyse, interpret and present the data.
Findings: The findings indicate that masculine attributes are associated with being ‘umjita’, a tsotsitaal concept meaning a young man and ‘amajita’, meaning a group of young men that significantly shaped young men's health-seeking behaviours in Malukazi. Risky sexual behaviours, such as engaging in MSR/MSP and inconsistent condom use, were perceived as integral to Amajita’s identity and masculine prowess and are an important need to prove one’s masculinity to Amajita. Moreover, the stigma surrounding HIV and AIDS and fear of emasculation were found to deter young men from seeking HIV testing and healthcare services.
Conclusion: The findings highlight the critical role masculinity plays in shaping HIV risks and health-seeking behaviours among young men in Malukazi. Addressing the traditional norms of masculinity is essential as it promotes HIV prevention and care initiatives tailored to address the needs of this vulnerable population. There is a need to conduct research with the aim of providing an evidence base to develop and implement Interventions that challenge harmful gender norms, empower young men so that they adopt healthier behaviours and provide culturally sensitive healthcare services that prioritise confidentiality and respect. Addressing the intersection of masculinity with HIV-related risks and health-seeking behaviours can help advance efforts being made to mitigate the impact of the HIV epidemic among young men residing in informal settlements such as Malukazi.
An investigation of machine learning techniques for an improved intrusion detection system for the internet of things.
(2022) Afolabi, Hassan Adegbola.; Aburas, Abdurazzag Ali.
Internet of things (IoT) threats are difficult to detect because of the enormous variety of devices utilized in the internet of things environment. It is also challenging to design an effective security model for each type of device in the IoT. An intrusion detection system (IDS) is a tool for detecting network threats. Although IDSs have been well studied, it is challenging to realistically estimate their performance when deployed in real life due to the issues inherent to the datasets used to train them. This thesis examined machine learning (ML) techniques for an improved IDS for the IoT. During the investigation, a performance evaluation of some extensively used supervised ML methods was conducted using various benchmark imbalance datasets. Furthermore, a novel framework named random oversampling and tomek-links (RTL) was presented to minimize the effect of data imbalance in IDS datasets. Friedman and Dunn’s statistical tests were also conducted to examine the significant differences between classifiers with the primary goal of proposing an appropriate method for selecting diverse base classifiers for a stacking-type ensemble IDS. An intrusion detection model based on stacking ensemble named deep stacking of boosted machines (DSBM) was presented using extreme gradient boosting, light gradient boosting machine and gradient boosted machines as the base classifiers, and a deep neural network model as meta classifier. The proposed model was evaluated using records from all the nine devices in N-baIoT dataset. Several performance parameters such as accuracy, precision, recall, Fscore, the area under receiver operating characteristic curve, precision-recall curve, confusion matrix, matthew’s correlation coefficient, and kappa statistics were used to evaluate the proposed model. The transferability abilities of the proposed model were also studied by performing a cross-dataset evaluation using data samples from different devices in the N-BaIoT dataset as train and test sets to ensure that the proposed model can adjust to the inevitable changes in the network traffic generated by IoT. According to the results obtained, the proposed DSBM model is capable of outperforming other ML algorithms in terms of several metrics.
Design of a novel floating offshore wind turbine.
(2023) Cunden, Kumaresan.; Inambao, Freddie Liswaniso.
Over the past decade, the renewable energy sector nationally and globally has experienced a large growth due to factors such as increases in government subsidies and cost reductions. One of the fastestgrowing sectors within the renewable energy space is wind energy, however, the growth comprises mainly onshore wind farm developments but is limited by land availability. Typical wind turbine farms are large special deployments that accommodate large amounts of land. Offshore wind resources are normally higher density than that land-based resources due to fewer obstructions to the wind. The resource available offshore along the eastern and western coastline of South Africa has significant potential which may be tapped with offshore wind turbines. Findings from the investigation found four potential sites along the coastline of South Africa which are viable for offshore wind turbine exploration. The results of the study found that these sites can be connected to onshore bulk substations and located in zones that are outside the areas of shipping traffic to not affect economic trade. These locations allow suitable access to coastal areas and ports which can reduce strain on the national electrical grid as well as reduce transmission losses from inland power stations. The sites which were investigated have a mean wind speed of 9.5 m/s with power densities between 500 W/m2 and 1000 W/m2. However, the ocean seafloor depth between 1km and 3km deep poses a challenge, new floating wind turbine concepts and wind farm configurations technologies indicate that these may be overcome to harness the large energy potential. The study indicates that the offshore potential sites are suitable for offshore wind turbine development and grid integration. The sites which are closer to the shoreline (between 10km and 50km from the shore) have short-medium term deployment potential. The previously designed, vertical axis, ocean hydrokinetic turbine was optimized for wind conditions by evaluating a larger set of aerodynamic profiles. It was found that the symmetric profiles exhibited stable characteristics when under loading in the upwind and downwind side of the turbine resulting in a smoother transfer of torque to the rotor shaft. The results showed a smooth torque profile on the rotor with minimal main rotor vibration. Even though the aspect ratio of 1.5 has a larger operating range for large tip speed ratio (TSR) range, the aspect ratio of 1 has a higher coefficient of power range resulting in higher turbine power output.
The need for a suitable control volume for small scale testing led to the design and construction of a suitable wind tunnel for the small scale wind turbine testing. The wind tunnel was designed to
accommodate a small scale vertical turbine at a velocity of 9 m/s to 9.3 m/s based on the mean wind speed of the potential sites. The turbulence intensity was examined and found to be minimum across the testing section. A small scale wind turbine was fabricated based on the vertical axis helical blade which was designed at the optimum twist angle for an aspect ratio of 1, due to the nature of power and performance at selected TSR’s. The study had proven that the results from the test are in good comparison to that of the simulation. For utility scale turbines with larger power outputs (5MW to 10MW) the rotor speed would be between 10 and 15 RPM for maximum power output. The helical turbine, in comparison to reference HAWT and VAWT turbines within the market, show an improvement to the power curve efficiency. The helical blade profile shows positive results on the transmission of mechanical power from the blade to the rotor torque in comparison to other VAWT systems within the market. This allows for reduced impact on mechanical and electrical components of the turbine. When deployed in a standardised wind farm layout, the helical turbine outperforms the reference HAWT and VAWT turbines with respect to capacity factor and annual energy production. The investigation found that there are suitable offshore wind farm locations along the coastline of South Africa which can provide suitable clean energy as well as diversify the country’s energy mix as per the national development plan and long-term energy targets. The study concluded that the vertical axis turbine design can provide much needed power which may be fed into coastal regions at bulk point of supply or to offshore oil & gas rigs and possibly coupled with hydrogen technology in the future.