Researching to make a difference: Possibilities for social science research in the age of AIDS
Bibliographic record
Abstract
HIV and AIDS is recognized as one of the most devastating pandemics of sub-Saharan Africa, and South Africa in particular, with adverse effect on individuals, families, schools, communities and society at large. Research is therefore required to provide a deeper understanding of the complexities of HIV and AIDS in order to mitigate the effect of the pandemic. Much of the excellent research that has been done has been undertaken within a positivist paradigm and has focused on the biomedical aspects of HIV and AIDS, as well as the social aspects of the pandemic. This theoretical position paper draws on various projects in the field of HIV and AIDS education in rural KwaZulu-Natal to argue that more social science research should be framed within a participatory research paradigm, foregrounding participant engagement and process, and which simultaneously has a "research-as-intervention" focus.Such research adheres to the requirement of knowledge production, but also engages the participants as knowledge producers who, through the research process, are enabled to shift towards taking up their own agency. Reflecting on the findings from the various projects suggests that visual participatory methodologies are particularly useful when working with marginalized persons whose voices are seldom heard especially when exploring topics which are difficult to discuss. Furthermore, it brings issues to the fore and opens up debate, while at the same time democratizing research and allowing universities to take up their social responsibility and to contribute towards making a difference in the communities they serve.
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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 | 0.146 | 0.073 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.122 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.038 | 0.053 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.028 |
| Research integrity | 0.017 | 0.018 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
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".