9405939 Aptekar This research involves faculty and students from San Jose State University in collaboration with faculty and students from Kenya studying Kenyan street children. The hypotheses to be tested concern the nature of the families of origin of the children and the relation between aspects of rapid social and economic change, varieties of family social structure and economic base and the existence of street children originating from these families. By studying these issues in Kenya, where there are diverse family structures and different degrees of involvement in formal sector economies, the research addresses the effects of modernization on family structures and the relationship of poverty and trauma to child development. The specific goals of this project are to define street children by testing procedures to establish their number, age, gender, and street culture in five different sites in Kenya (the multi-site project will be proposed after this project ends). A multi-disciplinary team of anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, and education specialists from the US and Kenya, with their students, will conduct ethnographic interviews with street children, administer structured interviews and psychological tests and collect physical and archival data. This project is important because any theories of why homeless children exist in our own society must be tested comparatively to insure that the processes thought to cause homelessness are truly operative rather than merely correlating with other, unknown causal factors. By having comparative case studies such as the present one, our understanding of why children end up on the streets and our ability to cope with them will be advanced.
