The Volunteering Dogma and Canadian Work Experience: Do Recent Immigrants Volunteer Voluntarily?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article deconstructs the now common practice of immigrant volunteering for the purpose of upgrading or practicing job-related skills in Canada. The analysis draws on the findings of two separate qualitative studies related to the integration of immigrant adults in Southern Ontario. The first study (Wilson-Forsberg) focused on the settlement and adaptation experiences of immigrants (both men and women) from Latin America and the second study (Sethi) examined the impact of employment on the health and well-being of immigrant and refugee women from the visible minority population. Having re-analyzed our interview data to highlight the motivations behind participants’ volunteering and their perceptions of the experience, the findings suggest that immigrants volunteer to gain Canadian experience, to maintain remnants of professional identity, and to overcome loneliness and boredom. Intersectionality analysis of participants’ multiple intersecting identities reveals that immigrant volunteering is more complex than merely volunteering for upgrading human and/or social capital skills. The article concludes that, while volunteering can be beneficial to foster the social integration of immigrants, it appears to do little to enhance their economic integration. Cet article déconstruit la pratique maintenant courante des immigrants de faire du volontariat à fin d’améliorer ou de pratiquer leurs compétences liées à l’emploi au Canada. L’analyse repose sur les résultats de deux études qualitatives indépendantes reliées à l’intégration d’immigrants adultes dans le sud de l’Ontario. La première étude (auteur 1) a porté sur l’expérience d’établissement et d’adaptation d’immigrants (hommes et femmes) d’Amérique Latine et la deuxième étude (auteur 2) a examiné l’impact de l’emploi sur la santé et le bien-être de femmes immigrantes et réfugiées provenant de la population de minorités visibles. Après avoir révisé notre analyse des données ramassées lors des entrevues pour souligner les motivations qui poussent les participants à faire du volontariat et leurs perceptions de l’expérience, il apparaît que les immigrants font du volontariat pour gagner de l’expérience canadienne, pour maintenir un semblant d’identité professionnelle, et pour surmonter la solitude et l’ennui. L’analyse intersectionnelle des croisements multiples d’identités des participants révèle que le volontariat immigrant est plus complexe que le simple fait d’améliorer le capital d’habiletés humaines et/ou sociales. L’article conclut que bien que le volontariat soit bénéfique pour favoriser l’intégration sociale des immigrants, il ne semble pas rehausser leur intégration économique.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.027 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| 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".