OLDER LESBIANS RECEIVING HOME CARE: FORMAL AND INFORMAL DIMENSIONS OF CAREGIVING
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Older lesbians tend to be invisible in a world that presumes heterosexuality, favors youth and men, and lumps sexual minorities together under the umbrella category LGBT. Although there is ample evidence that LGBT older adults are distrustful of the long-term care system, little is known of the actual experiences older lesbians have with home care aides (HCAs), who are largely female and often older themselves. Feminist theory suggests potential points of connection between older lesbians and HCAs based on common experiences arising from gender and age. This national, qualitative study with 20 lesbians—65 and older and who had used home care services—sought to understand the relationships that develop between older lesbians and their HCAs, and how formal home care services fit into the study participants’ networks of informal care. Transcribed telephone interviews were analyzed for overarching themes. Although 70% of the sample indicated that they had had workers with whom they were dissatisfied, ultimately, nearly all (85%) reported having formed a positive relationship with at least one worker; and, professional relationships sometimes became social ones. Over one-third of the sample described some degree of isolation, underscoring the need for a formal support system that is sensitive to the needs of older lesbians. While the experience of homophobia for one quarter of the sample indicates that this sensitivity is still not guaranteed, the high incidence of good experiences provides evidence that well-trained HCAs can provide an important positive component of social support for older lesbians.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| 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".