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Ensuring ethical test use in South Africa : the role of Assessment Standards South Africa
(AOSIS, 2025-03) Laher, Sumaya; De Beer, Marie; Maree, David J.F.; Bischof, David A.
Historically, many psychological tests in use in South Africa are imported from Western contexts, creating challenges in applying them across South Africa’s diverse cultural and linguistic groups. The Employment Equity Act No 55 of 1998 prohibits the use of psychological assessments unless they are scientifically validated, reliable and unbiased for use with South Africans. Furthermore, the Health Professions Council of South Africa (HPCSA) plays a key regulatory role in ensuring that only qualified psychology professionals use these tests. The HPCSA’s Professional Practice Committee is currently responsible for classifying tests as psychological or not. The Professional Practice Committee does not evaluate the quality of tests. Recognising gaps in the regulatory framework, the three organisations most involved with psychological assessment in practice (the Psychological Society of South Africa [PsySSA], the Society for Industrial and Organisational Psychology of South Africa [SIOPSA] and the Association of Test Publishers [ATP]) collaborated to form Assessment Standards South Africa (ASSA). As a non-governmental body, ASSA oversees the quality of assessments, ensuring that they meet local and international standards. Assessment Standards South Africa’s guidelines emphasise transparency, ethical standards and the importance of local research to ensure the relevance of tests. Through initiatives such as the Assessment Standards Test Review System, ASSA has streamlined test certification and review processes, promoting responsible and ethical use of psychological and other assessment devices in South Africa. Assessment Standards South Africa offers a best practice model for test reviews to ensure responsible and ethical use of tests in South Africa.
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Narratives of risk : parents and community perspectives on food insecurity, alcohol use and sexual risk among adolescent girls in underserved communities
(MDPI, 2025-09) Davids, Eugene Lee; eugene.davids@up.ac.za
Underserved communities in South Africa face persistent inequalities that hinder the health and well-being of young people, particularly during the critical developmental phase of adolescence. This study explored perceptions of adolescent health and well-being among parents/guardians and community leaders of adolescent girls in two underserved communities in Gauteng, focusing on food insecurity, alcohol use, and transactional sex. The sample comprised 63 participants, including parents/guardians of adolescents and community leaders (such as individuals working for community-based organisations or regarded as trusted figures in the community). Two facilitators conducted 11 focus group discussions in English, Sepedi, and isiZulu. All sessions were audio-recorded, translated, and transcribed. The transcripts were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. The findings reflect community and parental narratives of risk, showing how adolescents in Mamelodi and Soshanguve—two underserved communities in Gauteng—experience food insecurity that contributes to underage drinking and transactional sex, ultimately leading to teenage pregnancies and HIV infection. The results highlight the risks faced by adolescents, showing how social and structural factors create conditions that enable underage drinking and transactional sex, thereby increasing vulnerability to pregnancy and HIV infection. This study highlights the urgent need for interventions that can effectively address these narratives of risk.
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Understanding customer grief in brand relationships
(Elsevier, 2026-01) Berndt, Adele; Tierney, Kieran D.
Brands are key in building customer-brand relationships, yet organisations change their product lines by reformulating or discontinuing brands. This results in negative customer emotions, including pain and grief. While identified in marketing, grief has received little academic attention. Thus, this research seeks to explore and develop an understanding of customer grief as pain. The empirical context is the change of a breakfast cereal. By applying netnographic research to eight customer-brand fora, this qualitative study analysed 4,080 online customer posts to understand customer grief. Applying the stages of the Kübler-Ross grief model, this study shows that grief is associated with a misalignment of customers’ expectations, practices, and emotions in response to an unexpected brand change. This generates a more fine-grained understanding of customer grief, providing theoretical and practical implications for organisations in managing their brand relationships. HIGHLIGHTS • The brand is key in building customer-brand relationships, yet organisations change their product lines. • Organisational actions can result in negative customer emotions such as grief. • The empirical context of the study is that of the withdrawal of a breakfast cereal. • This qualitative netnographic study analyses 4,080 online customer posts to understand customer grief. • The study applies the stages of the Kübler-Ross grief model in the context of marketing.
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Underrepresentation of bats in Africa's protected areas
(Wiley, 2025) Montauban, Cecilia; Budinski, Ivana; Webala, Paul W.; Laverty, Theresa M.; Tanshi, Iroro; Torrent, Laura; Bakwo-Fils, Eric; Taylor, Peter J.; Kane, Adam; Monadjem, Ara
Biodiversity is severely threatened globally, with habitat loss and other human pressures accelerating species extinctions. Protected areas (PAs) are a critical conservation tool; however, their effectiveness in safeguarding many taxa, such as bats, remains unclear. Using georeferenced occurrence records and species distribution models (SDMs) for 263 sub-Saharan African bat species, we evaluated the coverage of bats in 7875 terrestrial PAs. Eighty-nine percent of bat species were recorded in at least 1 PA, yet 28 species, including 5 threatened and 15 data deficient species, were absent from all PAs. Species with large extents of occurrence were represented in more PAs, and fruit bats occupied significantly more PAs than clutter, edge, or open-air insectivorous foragers. The SDMs revealed high species richness in some undersurveyed areas, particularly in West and Central Africa and the Albertine Rift, emphasizing the need for targeted surveys. Our findings underscore critical data deficiencies related to bat conservation and stress the urgency of integrating bats into broader conservation planning. More surveys, enhanced data-sharing, and tailored conservation strategies are needed to improve bat representation in PAs and safeguard their ecological roles in Africa's biodiverse landscapes.
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High-order flux splitting schemes for the Euler equations of gas dynamics
(Elsevier, 2025-09) Chu, Shaoshuai; Herty, Michael; Toro, Eleuterio F.
We develop high-order flux splitting schemes for the one- and two-dimensional Euler equations of gas dynamics. The proposed schemes are high-order extensions of the existing first-order flux splitting schemes introduced in Toro and Vázquez-Cendón (2012) where the Euler equations of gas dynamics are split into two subsystems: the advection and pressure systems. In this paper, we formulate the TV splitting within the semi-discrete framework to extend it to higher orders of accuracy for the first time. The second-order extension is obtained by using piecewise linear interpolant to reconstruct the one-sided point values of the unknowns. The third- and fifth-order schemes are developed using the finite-difference alternative weighted essentially non-oscillatory (A-WENO) framework, which is particularly effective in handling multidimensional problems and provides a more straightforward approach to constructing higher-order WENO schemes. These extensions significantly improve the resolution of discontinuities and the accuracy of numerical solutions, as demonstrated by a series of numerical experiments of both the one- and two-dimensional Euler equations of gas dynamics. HIGHLIGHTS • Extended first-order TV splitting to higher orders of accuracy. • Compared the efficiency against CU, HLL, and HLLC schemes. • Demonstrated improved resolution in 1D and 2D Euler equations of gas dynamics.