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"Children's well-being and social connection in rural South Africa"
Funded by the National Science Foundation for 2001-2003, this project examines the form and content of distributed and dispersed parental relationships and the practical consequences for children's well-being. The point of the research is to see how social and material resources are transmitted through dispersed networks and how the structure of those networks affects the physical and social well-being of children. Fieldwork is in the context of a longitudinal demographic survey of 60,000 people conducted by the Agincourt Health and Population Programme of the University of the Witwatersrand in a rural area of South Africa's Limpopo Province. The field research concentrates on observation of social interactions and material transactions approached from the perspective of such functional domains as children's nutrition, health, and schooling. The objectives in this research are to present an accurate and context-specific picture of the demographically relevant groups and relationships in the society and to demonstrate that such a picture can be established in a way that nevertheless allows comparison between different social and cultural situations. The Principal Investigator for this research is Nicholas Townsend, collaborating with Dr. Sangeetha Madhavan, who was a post-doctoral fellow in the Anthropology Department, and is now at the University of the Witwatersrand. Barbara Andrews, a graduate student in the Anthropology Department, has participated in the fieldwork.
