Faculty of Humanities
School of Languages
Department of Afrikaans
Selected Highlights from Research Findings
The research forms part of a SANPAD-funded project, of which one sub-project deals with designing interventions for destigmatizing people living with HIV/AIDS. In order to learn more about the perceptions of the youth with regard to stereotyping HIV positive persons, a critical discourse analysis was performed on 22 narratives written by white, Afrikaans-speaking secondary school learners. They were found to perceive self-stigmatization as an inevitable reaction to HIV/AIDS, and to regard finding a spiritual meaning in the disease as an effective coping strategy (which may be dangerous if it is assumed that the infected person is absolved from responsibility for his/her personal mental and physical health).
A second sub-project deals with the effectiveness of various presentation formats for low-literate readers. An extensive literature survey was conducted on the topic of tailoring print materials to match literacy levels. One of the findings that recurred in the literature was inadequate comprehension of visual symbolism by low-skilled viewers. A research project was subsequently designed to verify this finding through conducting semi-structured interviews with 30 respondents (speakers of African languages with a mean age of 45, and literacy levels below Grade 9). Fourteen pictures containing dimensions of visual symbolism, which appeared in educational documents on HIV/AIDS, were arranged in a narrative sequence, and respondents were requested to explain the main message of each visual. The data was coded and quantified. It was found that low-literate adults experience difficulty in interpreting visual metaphors, cartoon-style conventions and symbols associated with systems of formal logic. The interviews also yielded rich data on culture-specific interpretation of visual material.
Contact person: Prof A Carstens.
|
