'To the streets cuz we're on the streets': Exploring the controversy of homeless youth activism in Kitchener-Waterloo (Ontario)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Throughout the past years, homeless youth have been involved in activism in Kitchener-Waterloo (K-W), a mid-size city located in southern Ontario. Such activism has caused a great deal of controversy in the K-W community. The main objective of this research was to explore that controversy. The three main research questions used to explore this controversy were: (1) Why do homeless youth become involved in activism? (2) What are the effects of homeless youth activism? (3) What factors limit or facilitate homeless youth activism? I used a participatory action research approach, consisting of a steering committee of homeless youth and two hired homeless youth researchers. The hired researchers and I conducted a total of 13 interviews -5 adult key informants and 8 homeless youth- and 40 homeless youth completed surveys. Five themes emerged from both youth and adult interviews to clarify the controversy surrounding homeless youth activism: (1) the need/desire for social change in our society; (2) the importance of activism; (3) concerns about homeless youth; (4) factors limiting activism; (5) suggestions for effective action. On one hand, findings suggest that the motives for and effects of homeless youth activism are complex and political and that allowing homeless youth to be agents of change can have important benefits for their lives and for the community. On the other hand, certain concerns and limitations negatively affect the community's view of activism. These include concerns about homeless youth activists and their tactics, misunderstandings and situational/personal variations among participants, and the paternalistic/conservative nature of the K-W service system. Based on these findings, I provide recommendations for homeless youth activists, community workers/funders, and government actors in the Kitchener-Waterloo community.
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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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| 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".