Nicholas Munro

University of the Witwatersrand | wits

Mindfulness is currently regarded as a life skill as well as part of an approach to life that can generate beneficial intrapersonal and relational outcomes. Given the centrality of intrapersonal and relational outcomes in psychotherapeutic encounters, it seems logical that the practice of mindfulness by psychologists would be relevant to explore, e...

The process of transforming South African psychology requires several coordinated initiatives. One initiative likely to unlock the transformation process in exponential ways is through attaining race-based representativity in the South African psychology workforce. Using graduation data, this article reports on the pace of racial transformation and...

Research on the extent of food insecurity amongst the South African university student population has gained momentum over the past decade, and for good reason. Along with the multiple other challenges that South African university students face (e.g. funding shortfalls, limited access to student housing, high levels of failure and dropout, institu...

Gender is a fundamental element of social life but is premised on the notions of socially and culturally constructed differences which are almost always hierarchical in nature, imbued with power(lessness), and reinforced by binary thinking. Sport is one domain where gendered hierarchies, power struggles, and binaries have been most notable. CrossFi...

This chapter explores the use of photo elicitation interviews as a methodology for generating data on academic achievement emotions among high achieving undergraduate university students. Data is drawn from two studies which theoretically sampled 14 high achieving undergraduate students from a racially and culturally diverse South African universit...

Graduate tracer studies may be an appropriate research method for responding to various problems in the South African higher education context, including difficulties associated with higher education transformation and graduate employability. However, there is little context relevant literature on the implementation of the various methodologies tha...

This study explored the resilient academic identity constructions of two black father-absent females who were academically successful postgraduate students at a South African University Using resilience theory and an African metaphysical framework, the study highlights the conversational devices that these two female students used when constructing...

In the current #FeesMustFall activism, financial relief and support for higher education students are promoted as strategies to enhance access, persistence and progression in higher education. However, despite the increases in government and allied funding for higher education students, high-attrition and unsustainably low graduation rates persist....

Consistent with current higher education concerns with student engagement and the student experience, this study explored third-year undergraduate Finance students’ experiences of lecture-based active learning tasks. Finance students from the 2012 and 2014 cohorts from a South African university were invited to complete an anonymous questionnaire a...

In addition to being more likely to fail and dropout, African students are also less likely to succeed academically, let alone excel while doing so. In a critical move against a dominant deficit, failure, and drop-out discourse that surrounds African students in South African higher education, this paper reports on a study that explored exceptional...

The phenomenon of exceptional academic achievement in South African higher education is under-researched and frequently overshadowed by concerns around failure, underachievement, and poor quality of throughput. This paper reports on a study of exceptional academic achievement in one South African university. Taking a selection of contextually relev...

The experience of food insecurity in the South African university student population is not well documented or researched. Data to assess vulnerability to food insecurity in a sample of 1.083 students from the University of KwaZulu-Natal (Pietermaritzburg Campus) was collected between 2007 and 2010 via a questionnaire developed specifically for thi...

This study explores the relationships between character strengths and psychological type in a sample of university peer educators. As part of their training, 69 peer educators from the University of KwaZulu-Natal completed both the Values in Action Inventory of Strengths (VIA-IS) and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). The administration of the...

Peer educators at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg Campus undergo initial training in basic helping and life skills development. The training requires the peer educators to complete the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® (MBTI), a widely used assessment aimed at identifying differing, non-pathological personality traits in individuals. T...