Planting the Seeds: The Experiences of Community Psychology Graduates as Agents of Systemic Social Change
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Social change is a part of human existence, but other than charismatic individuals such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi, little has been published about the lived experience of social change agents. Time (era, passage of time, etc.) is often neglected as an important temporal factor of analysis in systemic social change (SSC) activities. The intent is to explore the experience of people working as SSC agents and discover what influences their work. A better understanding of this experience would contribute to more effective SSC work and perhaps address challenges facing change agents. The main research question, “What are the experiences of WLU Community Psychology programme graduates as agents of social change over the last 30 years?” considers temporal influences, varying socio-economic and political contexts and responses to those challenges. Constructivist, hermeneutical and dialectic epistemologies for this exploratory research project were used in a case study method approach, analyzed for sensitized thematic content across cases. A stratified, purposive mixed male and female sample of 15 WLU graduates represented classes from 1975 to 2005 and was divided into three 10-year cohorts, 1975–1985, 1986–1995, and 1996–2005 with five participants per cohort. Semi-structured interviews were completed, transcribed and member-checked by participants before coding, using NVivo software (Richards, 1999). Field notes along with archival research provided additional data sources for triangulation. The initial findings were reviewed by a cohort member. Based on the findings, I developed a collective definition of SSC and a framework for understanding a collective experience of systemic change. Furthermore, recommendations are presented for supporting change agents, individually and collectively, in their work.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".