Risky business: a narrative inquiry of male child and youth care practitioners' use of therapeutic touch
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Male child and youth care (CYC) practitioners have rarely been queried about how, or if, they use therapeutic touch (TT) with clients. A significant amount of literature suggests that TT with children and youth can have a positive impact on development, social, emotional and physical wellbeing, and a reduction of aggressive behaviour. However, for male practitioners, using caring touch with clients grows ever more precarious given the increased perception that they are vulnerable to allegations of misconduct and concern that touching clients could be triggering. This narrative inquiry examines how male CYC practitioners make sense of, and engage in, the use of therapeutic touch. Through interviews of five men from Vancouver Island, British Columbia, stories were collected about experiences, values, and personal histories to discover how they were informed about and navigate therapeutic touch with clients. Four themes were identified including, the story of patriarchy, fear, vulnerability and connection. How participants approach their use of therapeutic touch was found to depend on early life experiences, important life events, anecdotal evidence that reinforced fears about using touch, and the current social and political culture such as the #metoo movement. This study also finds that more research, dialogue and training is needed in order for male CYC practitioners to feel safe and competent to use therapeutic touch in a way that is beneficial for clients.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".