Daily Activities and Self-Perceptions about Productivity among Saskatchewan Welfare Recipients
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The history of social welfare shows long standing public antipathy against those who rely on social assistance to meet their needs (Wardhaugh, 2003;Swanson, 2001;Burman, 1996).With welfare comes the stigma of irresponsibility and laziness, labels that have persisted to this day.The concept of productivity -the measure of a person's contribution to society -is firmly entrenched in the realm of paid economic activity, or how one earns their keep.To be on social assistance is a form of social exclusion and the stereotypical view is thus that people on welfare are completely unproductive.As part of a SSHRC-funded project on "redefining productivity," this paper challenges this view.The study uses a descriptive and exploratory approach in order to gain a clearer picture of the nature of social assistance recipient's activities in the home, community and paid labour market.Knowledge of these areas will assist us in developing a better understanding of the actual contributions of welfare recipients to social productivity.Current social assistance policy directions do not take into account the lived experiences of welfare recipients.This study seeks to address this gap.In all, 30 interviews with welfare recipients were conducted in two urban centres in Saskatchewan to form the empirical foundation of this work.The daily activities of welfare recipients are described from their perspective.The research findings suggest that the common perception of welfare recipients as unproductive and inactive falls short of the reality of their day-today lives.Furthermore, the research participant's own perceptions of productivity, and of their role and place in the community and the larger society, are presented.The paper concludes by recommending that the contributions of welfare recipients, both paid and unpaid, be recognized and acknowledged in terms of their immediate and potential benefits to societal well-being.
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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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".