Living alone in the age of freedom: The paradox of solo households in postapartheid South Africa
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This paper considers an apparent paradox in South Africa: the share of single‐person households increased after the end of apartheid despite the ending of apartheid's racial laws that restricted ‘African’ families from living together, the postapartheid state's building of around four‐million low‐cost houses for families, the economies of scale offered by multiple‐person households in a country where poverty remains prevalent and the reduced significance of some of the longstanding sites of single‐person households—including mining compounds and hostels for men. Bringing together quantitative and qualitative data, we argue that solo dwelling remains associated with persistent rural–urban spatial divisions, increased migration and urbanization, continued declining marriage rates and the nature of employment. These arguments are supported by quantitative data that show an increase in solo dwelling, its greater occurrence among men and working‐age African men, in particular, its concentration in certain urban spaces and the way it fluctuated in the 2000s according to changing labour market conditions. We also draw on a township survey and interviews that show how, as apartheid restrictions collapsed, new areas of land suitable for solo living became available in the 1990s and provide examples of unmarried and married adults living alone, including to access work opportunities.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".