IT’S AN INTIMACY CRITERION: RELATIONSHIPS IN LATE LIFE FROM A PERSONAL COMMUNITIES APPROACH
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The literature on social capital, social support and social networks usually describes the resources available in the network of the older person. Although some of that literature includes the concept of emotional support or measures to recognize emotional closeness, the studies rarely recognize the emotional nuances and the subjective meaning of those relationships. This paper seeks to explore the diversity of ties that form older people’s emotionally close network of relationships or personal communities, as defined by Pahl and Spencer (2010), and the meanings and more subtle functions of these personal relationships in late life. I draw upon 40 qualitative interviews conducted with Chilean men and women between 60 and 74 years old to examine how they define and identify personal ties considered important to them. The interviews were aided by a method of mapping personal relationships that was suitable to elicit the identification of people who were relevant for reasons beyond the help exchanged. The interviews were analyzed using a thematic analysis and the personal communities were classified using a typology proposed by Spencer and Pahl (2006). The personal communities approach proved useful to analyze the composition of older people’s network of close relationships and to recognize the different manners in which family members and friends are relevant in late life. A particular contribution of this paper is a proposed complementary typology based on the distinction between ‘clustered’ and ‘hierarchical’ personal communities. This distinction gives additional information to depict and define emotional closeness and represent suffusion of personal relationships.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| 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".