Widowers' strategies of self-representation during research interviews: a sociological analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT This article analyses the strategies that older widowers used to assert their masculinity during in-depth research interviews by the author, a middle-aged woman. Twenty-six widowers living in Atlantic Canada and Florida in the United States and who were aged from 56 to 91 years participated in the study. The author analysed the interviews from a symbolic-interactionist perspective that looks at the world from the perspective of those being studied. The widowers used various strategies of impression management to reinforce their identity as ‘real men’ during the interviews. These strategies included taking charge of the interview, using personal diminutives and endearments to assert control, lecturing the interviewer about various topics including differences between men and women, and bringing attention to their heterosexuality by referring to themselves as bachelors and commenting on increased attention from women. The paper chronicles the process of discovery of the importance to the study participants of portraying themselves as men. It was found that older widowers' identity as ‘real men’ is precarious because they lack three essential components of masculinity: being in a heterosexual relationship, being employed, and being young. The article makes extensive use of the participants' quotations to demonstrate their attempts, through impression management, to maintain a masculine identity while discussing the very topics that threatened it.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".