Mark Orkin
Biographic Data
| ID | 97267 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Mark Orkin |
| GIVEN NAMES | Mark |
| FAMILY NAME | Orkin |
| SIGNATURE | ORKIN M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of the Witwatersrand |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9951-6733 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 65 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1969 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
The Hidden Struggle
The COVID-19 pandemic and associated lockdown had a profound impact on mental health in South Africa, particularly among marginalised groups. The University of Johannesburg / Human Sciences Research Council (UJ/HSRC) COVID-19 Democracy survey was a cross-sectional online survey conducted in five rounds covering a 20-month period from mid-April 2020 to November 2021 and involving nearly 45,000 participants. Our findings show that stress, depressio…
Accelerating achievement for Africa’s adolescents
By 2050, one in four people in the world will live in Africa. The region’s adolescents are our present and future but need effective services to support their holistic health and wellbeing, advance their education, allow them to flourish, and protect them from adversity. This paper reviews evidence for a new concept of ‘development accelerators’: interventions that can help achieve multiple Sustainable Development Goals simultaneously. Across 26 …
Contextually Sensitive Polyvictimization Profiles and Physical and Mental Health Outcomes among South African Adolescents from Low-Resource Communities
Adolescents in South Africa may experience violence victimizations in many forms (abuse, bullying, assault) and across many contexts (home, school, community). Polyvictimization is a valuable framework to examine the diversity of violence in adolescents’ lives, particularly when employed alongside person-centered methods such as latent class analysis. This study builds on previous work examining contextually sensitive patterns of polyvictimizatio…
Protective factors for adolescent sexual risk behaviours and experiences linked to HIV infection in South Africa
Effective structural interventions to improve food security and education enrolment among adolescent girls, and positive and supervisory caregiving among adolescent girls and boys are likely to translate into crucial reductions in sexual risk behaviours linked to HIV transmission in this population
Construction of a Reflective Quality of Life Index for Gauteng Province in South Africa
This paper demonstrates a simple methodological sequence for the statistical calculation of a context-sensitive quality of life index especially suitable for use in the Global South, i.e. lower and middle income countries. We draw on the large (n = 24,889), area-sampled, survey dataset of the fifth Quality of Life Survey (QoL V, 2017/18) of South Africa’s Gauteng province, conducted by the Gauteng City-Region Observatory. Using overtly explorator…
Providing Evidence and “Voice” During the Covid-19 Pandemic Using Online Rapid Response Surveys
COVID-19 presents significant challenges to society and to social scientists in their attempts to understand the unfolding consequences of the pandemic. This article examines how the UJ/HSRC COVID-19 Democracy survey responded to these challenges by conducting a series of rapid-response non-probabilistic surveys using a mass membership online data-free platform, known as the Moya messenger app. While not without its limitations, we argue that the…
Screening and supporting through schools
Schools may provide an important opportunity to identify unreached adolescents living with HIV and link them into care, focusing on adolescents with poor attendance, frequent sickness, low mood and slow learning. Key school-based markers for identifying unreached adolescents living with HIV may be low attendance, frequent sickness, low mood and slow learning. Improved linkages to care for adolescents living with HIV, in particular educational sup…
Pathways to poor educational outcomes for HIV/Aids-affected youth in South Africa
A recent systematic review of studies in the developing world has critically examined linkages from familial HIV/AIDS and associated factors such as poverty and child mental health to negative child educational outcomes. In line with several recommendations in the review, the current study modelled relationships between familial HIV/AIDS, poverty, child internalising problems, gender and four educational outcomes: non-enrolment at school, non-att…
Child-focused state cash transfers and adolescent risk of HIV infection in South Africa
BACKGROUND: Effective and scalable HIV prevention for adolescents in sub-Saharan Africa is needed. Cash transfers can reduce HIV incidence through reducing risk behaviours. However, questions remain about their effectiveness within national poverty-alleviation programmes, and their effects on different behaviours in boys and girls. METHODS: In this case-control study, we interviewed South African adolescents (aged 10-18 years) between 2009 and 20…
The hidden harm of home-based care
Millions of children in sub-Saharan Africa undertake personal and medical care for family members who are unwell with AIDS. To date, no research has investigated whether such care provision places children at heightened risk for pulmonary tuberculosis. This study aimed to address this gap by identifying risk factors for paediatric pulmonary tuberculosis symptomatology. In 2009-2011, 6002 children aged 10-17 years were surveyed using door-to-door …
Pathways from parental Aids to child psychological, educational and sexual risk
Increasing evidence demonstrates negative psychological, health, and developmental outcomes for children associated with parental HIV/AIDS illness and death. However, little is known about how parental AIDS leads to negative child outcomes. This study used a structural equation modelling approach to develop an empirically-based theoretical model of interactive relationships between parental or primary caregiver AIDS-illness, AIDS-orphanhood and p…
Persisting mental health problems among Aids‐orphaned children in South Africa
Background: By 2008, 12 million children in sub‐Saharan Africa were orphaned by AIDS. Cross‐sectional studies show psychological problems for AIDS‐orphaned children, but until now no longitudinal study has explored enduring psychological effects of AIDS‐orphanhood in the developing world. Methods: A 4‐year longitudinal follow‐up of AIDS‐orphaned children with control groups of other‐orphans and non‐orphans. 1021 children ( M = 13.4 years, 50% fem…
Transactional Sex Amongst Aids-Orphaned and Aids-Affected Adolescents Predicted by Abuse and Extreme Poverty
OBJECTIVES: Little is known about impacts of familial AIDS on abuse and sexual health outcomes amongst adolescents. Objectives were to determine whether familial AIDS is: (1) associated with severe physical, emotional, and sexual abuse; (2) associated with transactional sexual exploitation; and (3) explore whether relationships between familial AIDS and transactional sex are mediated by extreme poverty and abuse. DESIGN: Adolescent self-report st…
Cumulative risk and Aids-orphanhood
The Politics and Problematics of Survey Research
The Althusserian notion of a problematic refers to the underlying connections among the elements of a body of thought that shape its orientation. It is employed to examine the relationship between the practical decisions governing the actual conduct of attitude surveys and their sociopolitical context. Two sets of surveys, on preferences for political leaders and constitutional arrangements and on Black attitudes to sanctions against apartheid, a…
Inequality in South Africa
Trauma and Mental Health in South Africa
Building democracy in the new South Africa
This consideration of the task of building a ‘non‐racial, non‐sexist democracy’ in South Africa combines historical experience, political theory and survey results to which an organisational participation, democratic commitment, party allegiance and a sense of citizenship exist together in forms able to support a process of democratisation. In consequence, the author suggests that there are serious hazards inherent in either the liberal or Gramsc…
Democracy knows no colour
Umkonto we Sizwe (MK), the military wing of the African National Congress (ANC), was formed in South Africa by Nelson Mandela and others in 1961, a year after the ANC and its offshoot, the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC), were outlawed following the killing by police of sixty-nine black protesters at Sharpeville in March 1960. The armed struggle which MK waged against the apartheid state over the next thirty years presents, in Barrell's recent asse…
Beyond Alienation and Anomie
The Soweto revolt of 1976 was mounted by black students in South Africa mobilized under the banner of the Black Consciousness (BC) ideology. However, when thousands of these youths were driven into exile by state repression, they joined the African National Congress (ANC) or its military wing. When hundreds of them returned as guerrillas after 1978, some were arrested and tried, while others were involved in spectacular shootouts with the police.…
South Africa without Apartheid
Disinvestment, the Struggle, and the Future
A divided struggle
Analytical Hermeneutics
Positivism in social enquiry may be characterised in terms of three tenets: a determination to achieve causal laws, drawn on observable social phenomena, and arrived at by value-free procedures. In this paper 1 distinguish three varieties of behaviourism in sociology and psychology radical, analytical and descriptive behaviourism by the different ways in which they claim to satisfy the first two tenets, and argue that they evidently and necessari…
“Sensual … But not too far from Innocence”
(1980). “Sensual ... But not too far from Innocence”: A Critical Theory of Sexism in Advertising. Critical Arts: Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 38-50
Cumulative risk and Aids-orphanhood
Pathways from parental Aids to child psychological, educational and sexual risk
Increasing evidence demonstrates negative psychological, health, and developmental outcomes for children associated with parental HIV/AIDS illness and death. However, little is known about how parental AIDS leads to negative child outcomes. This study used a structural equation modelling approach to develop an empirically-based theoretical model of interactive relationships between parental or primary caregiver AIDS-illness, AIDS-orphanhood and p…
The Politics and Problematics of Survey Research
The Althusserian notion of a problematic refers to the underlying connections among the elements of a body of thought that shape its orientation. It is employed to examine the relationship between the practical decisions governing the actual conduct of attitude surveys and their sociopolitical context. Two sets of surveys, on preferences for political leaders and constitutional arrangements and on Black attitudes to sanctions against apartheid, a…
Building democracy in the new South Africa
This consideration of the task of building a ‘non‐racial, non‐sexist democracy’ in South Africa combines historical experience, political theory and survey results to which an organisational participation, democratic commitment, party allegiance and a sense of citizenship exist together in forms able to support a process of democratisation. In consequence, the author suggests that there are serious hazards inherent in either the liberal or Gramsc…
Trauma and Mental Health in South Africa
A divided struggle
Construction of a Reflective Quality of Life Index for Gauteng Province in South Africa
This paper demonstrates a simple methodological sequence for the statistical calculation of a context-sensitive quality of life index especially suitable for use in the Global South, i.e. lower and middle income countries. We draw on the large (n = 24,889), area-sampled, survey dataset of the fifth Quality of Life Survey (QoL V, 2017/18) of South Africa’s Gauteng province, conducted by the Gauteng City-Region Observatory. Using overtly explorator…
Inequality in South Africa
Democracy knows no colour
Umkonto we Sizwe (MK), the military wing of the African National Congress (ANC), was formed in South Africa by Nelson Mandela and others in 1961, a year after the ANC and its offshoot, the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC), were outlawed following the killing by police of sixty-nine black protesters at Sharpeville in March 1960. The armed struggle which MK waged against the apartheid state over the next thirty years presents, in Barrell's recent asse…
The Law of Costs
Change, Reform and Economic Growth
Change, Reform and Economic Growth in South Africa, by E. Webster and L. Schlemmer (eds.). Jhb.: Ravan Press, 1978. 244 pp
“Sensual … But not too far from Innocence”
(1980). “Sensual ... But not too far from Innocence”: A Critical Theory of Sexism in Advertising. Critical Arts: Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 38-50
Analytical Hermeneutics
Positivism in social enquiry may be characterised in terms of three tenets: a determination to achieve causal laws, drawn on observable social phenomena, and arrived at by value-free procedures. In this paper 1 distinguish three varieties of behaviourism in sociology and psychology radical, analytical and descriptive behaviourism by the different ways in which they claim to satisfy the first two tenets, and argue that they evidently and necessari…
A divided struggle
Disinvestment, the Struggle, and the Future
South Africa without Apartheid
Beyond Alienation and Anomie
The Soweto revolt of 1976 was mounted by black students in South Africa mobilized under the banner of the Black Consciousness (BC) ideology. However, when thousands of these youths were driven into exile by state repression, they joined the African National Congress (ANC) or its military wing. When hundreds of them returned as guerrillas after 1978, some were arrested and tried, while others were involved in spectacular shootouts with the police.…
Democracy knows no colour
Umkonto we Sizwe (MK), the military wing of the African National Congress (ANC), was formed in South Africa by Nelson Mandela and others in 1961, a year after the ANC and its offshoot, the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC), were outlawed following the killing by police of sixty-nine black protesters at Sharpeville in March 1960. The armed struggle which MK waged against the apartheid state over the next thirty years presents, in Barrell's recent asse…
Building democracy in the new South Africa
This consideration of the task of building a ‘non‐racial, non‐sexist democracy’ in South Africa combines historical experience, political theory and survey results to which an organisational participation, democratic commitment, party allegiance and a sense of citizenship exist together in forms able to support a process of democratisation. In consequence, the author suggests that there are serious hazards inherent in either the liberal or Gramsc…
Inequality in South Africa
Trauma and Mental Health in South Africa
The Politics and Problematics of Survey Research
The Althusserian notion of a problematic refers to the underlying connections among the elements of a body of thought that shape its orientation. It is employed to examine the relationship between the practical decisions governing the actual conduct of attitude surveys and their sociopolitical context. Two sets of surveys, on preferences for political leaders and constitutional arrangements and on Black attitudes to sanctions against apartheid, a…
Cumulative risk and Aids-orphanhood
Transactional Sex Amongst Aids-Orphaned and Aids-Affected Adolescents Predicted by Abuse and Extreme Poverty
OBJECTIVES: Little is known about impacts of familial AIDS on abuse and sexual health outcomes amongst adolescents. Objectives were to determine whether familial AIDS is: (1) associated with severe physical, emotional, and sexual abuse; (2) associated with transactional sexual exploitation; and (3) explore whether relationships between familial AIDS and transactional sex are mediated by extreme poverty and abuse. DESIGN: Adolescent self-report st…
Persisting mental health problems among Aids‐orphaned children in South Africa
Background: By 2008, 12 million children in sub‐Saharan Africa were orphaned by AIDS. Cross‐sectional studies show psychological problems for AIDS‐orphaned children, but until now no longitudinal study has explored enduring psychological effects of AIDS‐orphanhood in the developing world. Methods: A 4‐year longitudinal follow‐up of AIDS‐orphaned children with control groups of other‐orphans and non‐orphans. 1021 children ( M = 13.4 years, 50% fem…
Child-focused state cash transfers and adolescent risk of HIV infection in South Africa
BACKGROUND: Effective and scalable HIV prevention for adolescents in sub-Saharan Africa is needed. Cash transfers can reduce HIV incidence through reducing risk behaviours. However, questions remain about their effectiveness within national poverty-alleviation programmes, and their effects on different behaviours in boys and girls. METHODS: In this case-control study, we interviewed South African adolescents (aged 10-18 years) between 2009 and 20…
The hidden harm of home-based care
Millions of children in sub-Saharan Africa undertake personal and medical care for family members who are unwell with AIDS. To date, no research has investigated whether such care provision places children at heightened risk for pulmonary tuberculosis. This study aimed to address this gap by identifying risk factors for paediatric pulmonary tuberculosis symptomatology. In 2009-2011, 6002 children aged 10-17 years were surveyed using door-to-door …
Pathways from parental Aids to child psychological, educational and sexual risk
Increasing evidence demonstrates negative psychological, health, and developmental outcomes for children associated with parental HIV/AIDS illness and death. However, little is known about how parental AIDS leads to negative child outcomes. This study used a structural equation modelling approach to develop an empirically-based theoretical model of interactive relationships between parental or primary caregiver AIDS-illness, AIDS-orphanhood and p…
Pathways to poor educational outcomes for HIV/Aids-affected youth in South Africa
A recent systematic review of studies in the developing world has critically examined linkages from familial HIV/AIDS and associated factors such as poverty and child mental health to negative child educational outcomes. In line with several recommendations in the review, the current study modelled relationships between familial HIV/AIDS, poverty, child internalising problems, gender and four educational outcomes: non-enrolment at school, non-att…
Screening and supporting through schools
Schools may provide an important opportunity to identify unreached adolescents living with HIV and link them into care, focusing on adolescents with poor attendance, frequent sickness, low mood and slow learning. Key school-based markers for identifying unreached adolescents living with HIV may be low attendance, frequent sickness, low mood and slow learning. Improved linkages to care for adolescents living with HIV, in particular educational sup…
Providing Evidence and “Voice” During the Covid-19 Pandemic Using Online Rapid Response Surveys
COVID-19 presents significant challenges to society and to social scientists in their attempts to understand the unfolding consequences of the pandemic. This article examines how the UJ/HSRC COVID-19 Democracy survey responded to these challenges by conducting a series of rapid-response non-probabilistic surveys using a mass membership online data-free platform, known as the Moya messenger app. While not without its limitations, we argue that the…
Construction of a Reflective Quality of Life Index for Gauteng Province in South Africa
This paper demonstrates a simple methodological sequence for the statistical calculation of a context-sensitive quality of life index especially suitable for use in the Global South, i.e. lower and middle income countries. We draw on the large (n = 24,889), area-sampled, survey dataset of the fifth Quality of Life Survey (QoL V, 2017/18) of South Africa’s Gauteng province, conducted by the Gauteng City-Region Observatory. Using overtly explorator…
Protective factors for adolescent sexual risk behaviours and experiences linked to HIV infection in South Africa
Effective structural interventions to improve food security and education enrolment among adolescent girls, and positive and supervisory caregiving among adolescent girls and boys are likely to translate into crucial reductions in sexual risk behaviours linked to HIV transmission in this population
Contextually Sensitive Polyvictimization Profiles and Physical and Mental Health Outcomes among South African Adolescents from Low-Resource Communities
Adolescents in South Africa may experience violence victimizations in many forms (abuse, bullying, assault) and across many contexts (home, school, community). Polyvictimization is a valuable framework to examine the diversity of violence in adolescents’ lives, particularly when employed alongside person-centered methods such as latent class analysis. This study builds on previous work examining contextually sensitive patterns of polyvictimizatio…
Medicine (12 works) · Political science (12 works) · Psychology (11 works) · Poverty, Education, and Child Welfare (10 works) · Sociology (10 works) · Law (9 works) · Psychiatry (8 works) · Adolescent Sexual and Reproductive Health (6 works) · Environmental health (6 works) · Mental health (6 works)