Safer and unsafe injection drug use and sex practices among injection drug users in Halifax, Nova Scotia. An exploratory look at community and interpersonal influences.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: This qualitative study sought to explore the community and interpersonal (e.g., peer) influences affecting safer and unsafe injection drug use and sexual practices among injection drug users (IDUs) living in and around Halifax, Nova Scotia. METHODS: Sixty semi-structured interviews were conducted with IDUs, and key themes were identified. Two focus groups were also conducted to obtain feedback on the findings. RESULTS: There are key community and peer influences on drug use and sex practices. Needle exchange provides community access to clean needles, but when the needle exchange is closed, accessibility is an issue. Peers at times assist in reducing sharing by providing clean needles to friends who are without a needle or cannot access needles because of their circumstances (e.g., in prison). Peers also sometimes encourage condom use, but in certain contexts (e.g., with an intimate partner) condom use is often not supported. INTERPRETATION: Expanded and new prevention strategies--especially those utilizing peers--are urgently needed to discourage unsafe practices, and encourage safer practices among this population.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".