Bridging the Gaps: Access to Formal Support Services among Young African Immigrants and Refugees in Metro Vancouver
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Although it is widely recognized that the most marginalized people tend to face extra barriers when accessing mainstream services intended to serve everyone, few studies have dealt with the specific barriers and challenges that immigrant and refugee youth from small, marginalized communities encounter when seeking access to services aimed at facilitating their settlement and integration into Canadian society. Our exploratory study of the participation of young African newcomers in youth programs in Metro Vancouver goes some way towards filling this gap. In this paper, we report our key findings and their policy implications. The central finding of this study is that there are many gaps between the needs of young African newcomers and the services available in the wider community. While gaps inhibit successful integration by maintaining a separation of youth from mainstream society, bridges create a continuum of services that offer a stable pathway for youth and promote their integration into mainstream society. Unfortunately, in their attempts to access formal support networks, young African newcomers encounter more gaps than bridges. While newcomers from all countries have particular needs and challenges, the experiences of the young Africans described in this study provide an important reference point for scholars and practitioners who are concerned about the predicaments of newcomer youth, particularly refugees and those from marginalised communities. Bien qu’il soit largement reconnu que les personnes les plus marginalisées ont tendance à faire face à des obstacles supplémentaires quand ils cherchent à accéder aux services conventionnels destinés à tous, peu d’études ont porté sur les obstacles spécifiques et les défis auxquels les jeunes immigrants et refugiés, de petites communautés marginalisées rencontrent lorsqu’ils cherchent à accéder aux services pouvant faciliter leur établissement et intégration dans la société canadienne. Notre étude exploratoire de la participation des jeunes nouveaux arrivants africains dans les programmes de jeunesse de Metro Vancouver, va dans le sens de combler cette lacune. Dans cet article, nous présentons nos conclusions principales ainsi que leurs implications politiques. La conclusion principale de cette étude est qu’il y a beaucoup d’écarts entre les besoins des jeunes nouveaux arrivants africains et les services disponibles dans la communauté plus large. Pendant que les écarts empêchent l’intégration réussie en maintenant la jeunesse séparée de la société principale, les ponts créent une continuité des services qui offre une voie stable aux jeunes et promeut leur intégration dans la société principale. Malheureusement, dans leurs tentatives d’accès à des réseaux formels de soutien, les jeunes nouveaux arrivants africains rencontrent plus d’é-carts que de ponts. Alors que les nouveaux arrivants de tous les pays ont des besoins et défis particuliers, l’expérience des jeunes africains décrite dans cette étude fournit un point de référence important pour les chercheurs et praticiens qui sont préoccupés par les conditions précaires des jeunes nouveaux arrivants, particulièrement les réfugiés et ceux des communautés marginalisées.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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".