This pilot study addresses the need to clarify specific developmental vulnerabilities and strengths that characterise children living in child-headed households in comparison to children living in adult-headed households in equivalent impoverished communities. Samples of 10 each of these two categories of household were randomly selected from impoverished communities around Pietermaritzburg, South Africa (involving a total of 22 children from a child-headed households and 41 from an adult-headed households). Fourteen child-participatory, quantitative and/or qualitative measures were investigated over six indicative themes. Differences between the child-headed and adult-headed households were statistically or thematically analysed as appropriate to the data collected. Specific areas of vulnerability in the former households were access to institutional/social services, income (cash or kind) and resource generation, unresolved grief, lack of attainable long-term goals, poor self-worth, and poor internal locus of control. Specific strengths of children in those households were demonstrated in social networking, time and money management, and family interactions.

If educational psychologists wish to make a meaningful difference as practitioners, both to the children they work with and the ecologies these children come from, then, knowledge and application of resilience theory is crucial. Toland and Carrigan (2011) underscore this relationship in their 2011 article in this Journal. In our contribution below, we extend their assertion by urging greater attention to the interactive processes which underpin resilience and, more particularly, to how proximal, face-to-face transactions embedded in mesosystems and microsystems and nuanced by the distal, macrosystemic influences, mould resilience. Using examples from resilience research conducted in South Africa we argue that such a focus (i.e. on the transactional ecosystemic nature of resilience) is crucial in developing contexts. Furthermore, we contend that sensitivity to mechanisms of resilience as well as the contexts and cultures in which these continuously evolve, begs an approach to practice that foregrounds the ecosystemic, promotes child-ecology transactions, and is cautious about generalizing resilience theory to children across diverse contexts, cultures and time periods. To conceptualize resilience as anything but a reciprocal, dynamic, contextually-influenced interaction between children and their ecologies, would be to fail children in developing contexts.

Given the nature and the extent of the problem, the psychological and developmental implications of the street child phenomenon in South Africa needs to be more closely examined. Current research on street children presents us with a paradox — with evidence of developmental risk and vulnerability on the one hand and of resourcefulness, adaptability and coping on the other. This paradoxical evidence is reviewed from the perspective of physical, emotional, social and cognitive/educational development. Implications for intervention are explored. In particular, the issue of what defines developmental vulnerability or resilience in more specific terms is identified as a research necessity if more focused intervention priorities are to be determined.

This article reflects on several challenges that particular cultural, socio-economic and catastrophic factors (such as the HIV epidemic) pose to ethical practice in research involving child participation in a region such as southern Africa. With reference to concrete situations, we discuss research practices in relation to: countering the widespread power disparity between adults and children; ensuring the authenticity of children's evidence; obtaining informed consent; ensuring non-malfeasance and beneficence; and preserving the anonymity of participants and their sources. Within the authors' own research experience, selected elements of practice that have been helpful in addressing these issues are offered. It is hoped that the article may have relevance not only in the southern African context, but also for developing countries elsewhere.

Objective To evaluate specified biomedical, socio-economic, and psychosocial criteria as predictors of therapeutic success to optimize patient selection for continuous ambulatory peritoneal dialysis (CAPD) in a developing country. Design A restrospective cohort study investigating the relationship between episodes of peritonitis and exitsite infection, and predetermined biomedical, socioeconomic, and psychosocial data. Setting A CAPD unit in a large tertiary care teaching hospital. Patients AI1132 patients entering the CAPD program between 1987 and 1991. Results Overall mean survival time on CAPD was 17.3 months. Peritonitis rates were high, especially among blacks. Multivariate analysis demonstrated that increased peritonitis rates were associated with age, black race, diabetes, and strongly so with several psychosocial factors. Because being black was strongly linked to poor socioeconomic conditions, repeat analysis excluding blacks showed the same associations with the above variables, but, additionally, several socioeconomic factors were associated with high peritonitis rates. No significant explanatory variables were shown for exit-site infections. Conclusions The association of biomedical, socio-economic, and psychosocial variables with high peritonitis rates has important implications for the selection of patients for CAPD in this setting.

Controversy surrounds the role of illustrations in reading development. Supporters of the focal attention hypothesis claim that illustrations act as distractors in learning the cues to individual word recognition. Conversely, within a psycholinguistic framework, the contextual hypothesis maintains that in learning to read continuous text illustrations may constitute a legitimate source of semantic information. Whether this serves an adaptive function and at what levels of reading development was the essential research question.From 1868 children across grades I to V, 120 good and poor readers at reading ages 7 and 9 were selected. Subjects read narrative extracts of 320 words with or without illustrations. Results in general confirmed the contextual hypothesis. More specifically, illustrations were adaptively used in terms of textual message identification, information processing strategy and comprehension by good readers at RA7. Poor readers particularly at RA9 showed significant illustration effects but strategy results suggested a non-adaptive function. Good readers at RA9 were least affected, appearing independent of illustrative information. C 175

In this article, Kimberley Porteus and colleagues analyse the factors underlying school non‐attendance in three poor, marginalised communities in South Africa. The findings reveal that ‘poverty’, including the interaction between physical, social and psychological factors, has by far the greatest influence on children's being out of school. The study concludes that poverty needs to be addressed as a priority if the very notion of ‘inclusion’ is to have meaning in South African society.

SUMMARY. Previous conclusions regarding the negative effects of illustration on learning to read are challenged. The view that reading is a linguistically and contextually constrained process demands that the effects of illustration be evaluated in this context and not only on isolated word recognition. Clarity is also sought on the issue of comprehension. For 20 average, second-year readers, reading continuous text with and without illustration, it was found that illustration: (a) facilitated contextual word recognition accuracy, strategies reflecting use of contextual cues, the self-monitoring strategy of self-correction, and comprehension at the level of literal idea recall; (b) interfered with the use of graphic cues; and (c) had no effect on comprehension at the level of inference beyond literal content.