Matthew Bevers

Matthew Bevers

Race and Ethnicity SOC 111

4/2/17

Monitoring Perceptions of the Causes of Poverty in South Africa

This article attempted to measure the perceptions of poverty in South Africa. A random sample of 3,498 people were chosen throughout South Africa. Of all the demographics and variables used two of the most interesting demographics were that 39% of people who were interviewed were unemployed and that 23% of the sample had no formal schooling. The sample was asked why they felt people were living in poverty and were given 12 reasons why this was happening. Some of the reasons were: "They lack the ability to manage money" and "they have bad fate". They were then asked to rate each response from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). Reasons 1-3 measured if people thought the problem was on an individualistic basis. Reasons 4-7 measured if people that that poverty was a structural problem. Finally, statements 8-12 measured if people thought that poverty was related to fatalistic circumstances. The results for this survey were that people generally blamed structural deficiencies for poverty. While people blamed structural problems the most individualistic problems were a close second which supported previous studies done on this subject. Other interesting points were that the white people surveyed blamed individuals for poverty much more than any other race. Non-white people in the survey blamed society and structural problems more. These findings are not surprising especially taking into account that South Africa just recently became a democracy and where non-whites were aggressively in power for a long period of time. One of the most interesting variables in this survey was lived poverty and its relation to the cause of poverty to structural terms. People who had been in poverty or were currently in it, were much more likely to blame the cause of poverty on the structural problems in society. 

 

Knowing "Good Food": Immigrant Knowledge and the Racial Politics of Farmworker Food Insecurity

This article is about food insecurity among farmworkers and how they cope with said food insecurity. The author of the article claims that ethnic farmworkers are actually more aware and knowledgeable about nutritional foods than the government gives them credit for. And it's not the lack of knowledge that contributes to their food insecurity, but a lack of resources and, sometimes, the wrong resources in the case of food banks and low nutrition food programs. This article was very confusing to me and different than the other articles that I had done. A strong hypothesis was not given, no data or numbers were collected, and everything was done off of qualitative information I suppose. Methods were not explicitly listed, but this didn't feel like a traditional survey. The conclusion that the researcher drew was that when there is food insecurity in the farmworkers community they would rather start their own community farm land that members of the community could draw from. The researcher also went on to state that government underestimates the knowledge that farmworkers have regarding nutritional foods and that this belief is further hurting the communities of migrant workers. Overall, this study was not traditionally what I have come to expect and the lack of any strong scientific information or scientific process made me doubt this survey and find it to be lesser.