Country Living, Country Dying: Rural Suicides in New Zealand, 1900-1950
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The quality of rural living has long attracted contradictory assessments. In New Zealand where farm produce figured pre-eminently in the economy, opposing assessments abounded. Politicians tended to gloss over rural hardships, favoured an Arcadian myth, and initiated schemes to alleviate poverty by putting people on the land; dissenting portrayals emerged from the country's realist literature. Historians have taken sides but, in common with social historians everywhere, their assessments of the quality of life turn on fragmentary evidence. Moreover, the typicality of well-documented cases is open to question. First hand accounts by farmers, farm labourers, and farm women are scarce. A study of inquests into the suicides of over a thousand rural New Zealanders overcomes a dearth of information and provides nation-wide coverage over many decades. Witnesses' depositions afford glimpses into the material and emotional crises during booms, slumps, depressions, and wars. Rural men had a much higher suicide rate than urban men. Farm operators endured debt and commodity price fluctuations, while farm labourers-essential to farm profitability-faced emotional, financial, and physical hazards from youth to old age. Rural life for many offered no unqualified release from the stresses of the modern age.
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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".