Deciding How to Get By: Subsistence Choices among Homeless Youth in Toronto
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation develops insights into subsistence related decision-making from the perspective of homeless and street involved young people themselves through 39 in-depth and life story interviews. The interviews provide insight into two important and underexplored questions: how the social organization of street spaces shapes street life and subsistence; and how the self is implicated in subsistence related decision-making. To address these questions the analysis develops a conceptual model based on field theory (Bourdieu 1984; Green 2008; Martin 2003) that conceptualizes “the street” as a collection of interlocking subfields—unique social terrains structured at the intersection of various social forces that position actors relative to one another and that orient actors towards particular approaches to street life. The core concepts of field theory—field, capital, and habitus—provide insight into how the unique social spaces of homelessness distribute resources, stratify actors, and provide discourses that frame practice. The analysis demonstrates the strength of this approach through case studies of three such subfields in Toronto. Further, the analysis extends the field framework, and contributes to research on the role of the self in street life, by examining how narratives influence the navigation of street spaces. Actors use narratives to make sense of their circumstances and to invest lines of action with a sense of personal meaning. This narrative perspective is integrated with a dual process approach to action (Vaisey 2009) that states that action is influenced by internalized dispositions formed through experience and upbringing (habitus), as well as through available cultural resources that underwrite and legitimize courses of practice. I extend this approach by considering how these two processes interact within narratives, and how the resulting interplay shapes how the homeless navigate the social spaces of homelessness.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".