“Financially irresponsible and obviously neurotic need not apply”: Social Work, Parental Fitness, and the Production of Adoptive Families in Ontario, 1940–1965
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A discourse on adoption emerged between 1948 and 1965 in which the fitness of parents was given primary emphasis and was measured by new tools of psychological assessment. The postwar years were characterized by new attention to mental health and a revitalized family imperative. Social workers fought to establish their own authority over adoption practices, against the private, “grey market” arrangements made by doctors and lawyers. Social workers attempted to do this in two ways: by shoring up responsibility for the “home visit”, the technique by which they could assess “proper” motivations and fitness of parents; and by linking the fitness of parents to the postwar project of nation-building. The plight of “unadoptable” children presented a public challenge to the discretionary, regulated practices established by social workers, however, and they redoubled their efforts to find homes for hard-to-place children. In the process they contributed to the creation and maintenance of particular visions of Canadian identity and otherness.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".