Traditional medicine and religious approaches in adapting to maternal and infant health threats among Zimbabwean migrant women in Giyani, South Africa
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study illustrates how the Karanga, a subset of Shona-speaking Zimbabwean migrant women resident in Giyani, South Africa, use aspects of traditional medical and religious practices to protect their health and the lives of their children. It investigates the creative strategies employed by these women to negotiate the effects of their exclusion from South African public healthcare systems. The study draws on key informant interviews, unstructured interviews and life histories. Findings indicate that migrant women and their children are vulnerable to a wide range of health threats. Lack of access to public health services worsens their vulnerability. However, they also demonstrate creativity and agency in devising strategies for mitigating health risks. As coping strategies, migrant women in Giyani use both traditional medical and spiritual faith-healing approaches. Furthermore, how they detect, diagnose, and define illness or lack of health influences their mode of healthcare choice within the limited options available.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".