Investigating a theory of housing, ontological security and self-identity: A qualitative analysis of interview data in a multi-cultural Canadian city
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Workshop 1. Session 1.1: Poverty and identity. Abstract: This paper reports the findings of a qualitative study investigating the utility of the theoretical constructs ontological security and self-identity for understanding the routinized, everyday experience of housing and home. In-depth interviews conducted with 16 households in two inner-city neighbourhoods in Vancouver, Canada form the empirical basis for this study. The chief purpose of the study was to ascertain the nature and extent of the role played by housing and home in the ongoing maintenance of ontological security and the construction of self-identity for residents of the two case-study neighbourhoods. The main theoretical guide for this research is Giddens theory of modernity and self-identity (Giddens 1991), with particular emphasis on two key concepts: a) ontological security, which Giddens argues is the chief underpinning of human consciousness through which everyday, routinized experience in late modernity must be understood; and b) self-identity, which Giddens argues becomes a reflexive project in late modernity, ordered by narratives of the self. The findings suggest that informants experiences of home were very much articulated through notions of ontological security, both in a material sense and in the sense that a stable home provided the means to generate an ongoing stability of self-identity and sense of control over everyday life circumstances. The intersection between self-identity and the home was also universally present amongst the informants, subject to the informants stage in the life-cycle. A further, unanticipated finding was that ontological security was also articulated through a racialized discourse of neighbourliness, with some informants highly accepting of the racial diversity of their neighbourhoods, others rejecting it, and a third group expressing ambivalence. The findings of this research suggest that Giddens theory offers a rich and empirically robust way to theorize the mental geography of residential environments.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.021 | 0.023 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.031 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".