AAMUSTED Knowledge Manager

Welcome to the AAMUSTED Knowledge Manager (Institutional Repository), an open access digital archive of scholarly intellectual and research outputs of AAMUSTED. The Knowledge Manager contains and preserves: Theses and Dissertations; Research Articles and Conference Papers; Rare and Special Materials and many other Digital Assets of the University.

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    The Social Intentionality of Battered Women’s Agency in Ghana
    (Psychology and Developing Societies, 2018) Baffour Adjei, Stephen
    There is a growing body of research which suggests that victims of intimate partner violence (IPV; mostly women) continue to remain in abusive relationships. Many of the Western psychological theorisations focus on battered women’s personal dispositions and/or the self-creating (individualistic) view of agency to explain why victims remain in violent relationships. These studies seem to suggest that staying in a violent relationship is a personal decision that victims make in free will, and that victims who continue to stay fail to act on their own behalf. Drawing upon the Ghanaian communal conceptualisation of personhood and the social norms of marriage and divorce, this study questions the individu alistic theorisations of battered women’s decisions to stay in or leave abusive relationships. The article argues that battered women’s agency in negotiating the stay/leave decisions in abusive relationships does not only originate in an independent autonomous self, nor constituted by a person’s internal motives, but also, and even primarily, it is culturally grounded and dependent on social relations for its realisation. The article concludes that the agency of abused women in Ghana has a social inten tionality, in the sense that battered women’s intentional behaviour in marital relationships is both constituted by self and constrained by their relational embeddedness
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    Socio-economic and technological aspects of mental health of older persons: the role of strong and weak ties in Ghana
    (ARTICLE, 2022-01-27) Adusei Amoah, Padmore; Osei-Tutu, Annabella; Baffour Adjei, Stephen
    Research indicates that social capital can influence the extent to which socio-economic status (SES) and information and communications technology (ICT) affect mental health. This study uses empirical data to examine the veracity of this claim by examining the effect of SES and ICT use on the mental health of older persons in Ghana, as well as the mod erating role of bonding (i.e. strong ties) and bridging (i.e. weak ties) social capital in these associations. Data were drawn from 409 older persons from four regions in Ghana as part of a broader cross-sectional survey. Ordinal logistic regression analyses showed that SES and ICT use had positive associations with mental health after adjusting for other socio-demographic factors. Bridging social capital modified the association between SES and mental health positively. Bonding social capital also moderated the relations between ICT use on mental health positively. We argue that the prevalent nature of resources embedded in strong ties and the diversity of support that emerge from weak ties account for the difference in their influence observed in this study. Thus, while advances in socio economic and technological conditions can enhance older persons’ mental health, equal attention must be paid to the characteristics of their strong and weak ties as they possess the resources to make socio-technological policies even more meaningful.
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    Sociocultural Groundings of Battered Women’s Entrapment in Abusive Marital Relationship in Ghana
    (Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma, 2017-05-17) Baffour Adjei, Stephen
    While social psychological theorizations have contributed to our understanding of why battered women continue to remain in abusive intimate relationships, its apparent exclusive focus on individual victims’ psychological orientation leaves little conceptual space for discovering the subtle ways by which social and cultural norms shape the stay/leave decisions of victims of spousal violence. Drawing upon discursive psychol ogy, this study explores the sociocultural groundings of stay/ leave decisions of battered women in Ghana. Semi-structured focus groups and personal interviews were conducted with 32 participants: 16 victims and 16 perpetrators from rural and urban Ghana. Discursive accounts of participants suggest that post-divorce social stigma, remarriage alternatives, and post divorce child care, as well as privacy framing of marital abuse function in concert to influence battered women’s entrapment in violent marital relationships. The article argues that, rather than individual psychological orientation, the decision to stay in or leave abusive marital relationships in Ghana is sociocul turally and structurally grounded. To understand the highly complex nature of spousal violence, one must always go beyond the person and his or her psychological orientations, and seek the origin of battered women’s entrapment also in the external conditions of life, and in the sociocultural and structural forms of human existence
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    Sign Language Interpreter-Mediated Qualitative Interview with Deaf Participants in Ghana: Some Methodological Reflections for Practice
    (The Qualitative Report, 2022-04-01) Baffour Adjei, Stephen; Sam, Tara Sarah; Owusu Sekyere, Frank; Boateng, Philip
    Qualitative research is adventurous and creative, and committed to understanding unique human experiences in specific cultural ecologies. Qualitative interviewing with Deaf participants is far more challenging for hearing researchers who do not understand sign language, and for this reason such interactions may require the use of a sign language interpreter to facilitate the interview process. However, the quality of sign language interpreter-mediated interactions is likely to be compromised due to omissions, oversights, misinterpretations or additions that may occur during translation. An unthoughtful and poor interpretation of a communicative event by a sign language interpreter during a qualitative interview with Deaf participants may lead to an imposition of the interpreter’s or the researcher’s realities on Deaf participants’ lived experiences. It is thus important that qualitative researchers who conduct sign language interpreter-mediated interviews with Deaf participants employ practical and flexible ways to enhance such interactions. To understand the everyday realities of Deaf people amid the Covid-19 pandemic in Ghana, and document same to inform policy and practice, we conducted qualitative interviews with Deaf participants in Ghana. In this article, we draw insights from our data collection experiences with Deaf participants in Ghana to offer some useful methodological reflections for minimizing omissions in sign language-mediated qualitative interviews and thereby enhancing qualitative data quality. We particularly discuss how qualitative researchers can use language flexibility and post interview informal conversations with a sign language interpreter to create a natural non-formal interactional atmosphere that engenders natural conversational flow to minimize interpretation omissions and differential power relations in sign language interpreter-mediated qualitative interviews with Deaf participants.
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    Masculinity and Spousal Violence: Discursive Accounts of Husbands Who Abuse Their Wives in Ghana
    (ORIGINAL ARTICLE, 2015-09-22) Baffour Adjei, Stephen
    This study investigated the influence of cultural notions of masculinity and its enactments on husband-to wife abuse in Ghana from a discursive psychological perspec tive. Two focus group discussions and four in-depth personal interviews were conducted with 16 perpetrators (husbands) from rural and urban Ghana. Participants’ discursive accounts revealed that social anxieties of husbands, their fear of being perceived by others as weak or emasculated, and their disap pointment with unfulfilled notions of masculine sovereignty influence conjugal violence. Perpetrators constructed a wife’s expression of dissent to her husband’s wishes and commands as an encroachment on masculine spaces, a gender-norm vio lation, or as providing a public challenge to male identity and thus violence could be used as an obligatory passage to man hood. Perpetrators also mobilized shifting and ambivalent dis courses that draw upon culturally familiar notions of maleness to both resist and authorize a patriarchal privilege in marriage.