INSTITUTIONALIZED CHILD CARE IN URBAN SOUTH AFRICA

highlighting the diversity of situations that could lead to a child being categorized as
OVC or the diversity of challenges that children in a single institution face could help
restore some of the discourse’s missing nuances.
Ethnographic Approaches
Many of the studies of OVC have relied on either a local curation of a population
or a sample size stemming from one or more institutions, based on the assumption that
the children within an institution would share similar causes and measures of
vulnerability. (Delva, 2009; Nyamukapa, 2010) These assumptions have been made with
a fair amount of validated accuracy by the studies that followed, which suggests that
institutions are an appropriate field for studying OVC, provided that the omission of
children living with caregivers established by kinship networks, street children, children
living under child-headed households, or in other scenarios is at minimal risk of altering
results.
As institutions show potential as a research field with a resident population,
sociologically driven studies may be more effective in shaping an understanding of daily
life for a child living at an institution than a more quantitative study or binary-based
survey. Soliciting direct opinions and responses from children themselves to help craft
this portrait is a method that has been occasionally employed, although not to the point
where the responses have been seen to guide further research. Methods including
participant observation and in-depth interviewing have been used minimally, thus far, and
show promise as ethnographic tools. Few ethnographic approaches have been taken
towards studying OVC populations, presenting a prominent gap in the literature.
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