"In the Middle of Everywhere:" A Phenomenological Study of Mobility and Dwelling Amongst Rural Elders
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study aimed to investigate the phenomenon of the meaning of mobility for elders living in rural areas. A phenomenological study was undertaken with older people living in rural South West England and Wales. Ten interviews were undertaken in peoples’ homes and focused on the spatial dimensions of what it was like to live in the rural area and the everyday experiences of traversing rural space. Spatial mobility was experienced by our sample as any of the possible ways that achieved personal life activities where the traverse of space was normally relevant. We describe the meaning of mobility sensitised by the terms used in the “continuum of mobilities” (Parkhurst et al., 2012): “literal mobility,” “virtual mobility,” “potential mobility,” and “imaginative mobility.” Our phenomenological findings revealed that the transport and mobility needs of older people living in rural areas could not be meaningfully understood without understanding their well-being priorities, the kinds of movement that constituted well-being, and how this related to the phenomenon of “dwelling,” which included their feeling of “at-homeness” in their rural environment. But also what emerged was a second phenomenon that we have called rural living as a portal to well-being in older people. The connection between well-being and rural place was constituted by two interrelated experiences: the importance of dwelling and slowing down in older age, and the importance of a “rich textured locale” for the well-being of rural older people. We conclude by considering how the elders in our study may have something important to remind us: that mobility and sense of place are mutually implicated and that our present culture places an over emphasis on mobility, which may obscure the value of dwelling.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".