Older physically active women's perceptions and experiences of body self-compassion
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The physical realities of growing older such as grey hair, sagging skin, weight gain, and wrinkles negatively influence the body image and identities of older women (Hurd Clarke, 2010). As such, self-compassion (Neff, 2003) may assist older women in managing their aging body related experiences. A hermeneutic phenomenological analysis of a series of semi-structured interviews with 21 women (42 interviews) aged 65 to 94 was employed to investigate the lived experience of body image and self-compassion in later life. Findings revealed that women experienced a sense of freedom in late life, as they no longer felt pressure to appear feminine, which they equated with the ability to be sexually attractive to the male, masculine other. However, participants simultaneously expressed disappointment and frustration as they perceived to no longer be able to conform to the young, thin, and physically active cultural female ideal. This ambivalence fostered self-criticism, self-doubt, and feelings of isolation, often rendering self-compassion for the aging body difficult and idealistic. At the same time, some women perceived that their embodiment of self-compassion enabled them to manage the inevitable age-related physical and social declines. Others, however, perceived that being critical of their body's appearance and function kept them motivated to be physically and socially active. The participants resisted self-compassion as they feared it would render them complacent and act as a barrier to their ability to stave off the aging process. Findings will be considered in relation to the extant literature on aging, body image, physical activity, and self-compassion.Acknowledgments: This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".