The Generationing of Social Assistance Receipt and “Welfare Dependency” in Ontario, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Adopting a life course perspective, we explore, qualitatively, how receipt of social assistance in Ontario is generationally experienced. Data are drawn from a study of family and generational relationships with Ontario Works (OW), which included in-depth interviews with 31 participants who also had a child or parent on social assistance; we drew from three Canadian cities: Hamilton, London, and Toronto, Ontario. Our thematic analysis reveals that generation matters and in ways less confined than the ideation embedded in the discourse of welfare dependency. Through a life course lens, we find that while older and younger kin may concurrently access assistance, any generation’s entrance onto it must be understood as varying by social, historical, and structural context, which itself varies over their individual life courses. We define this process as the “generationing” of social assistance receipt. We further reveal how this generationing interacts with gender, race, Indigeneity, and class. We therefore argue that the generationing of social assistance receipt prompts re-conceptualization of taken-for-granted ideation in the discourse of welfare dependency and, thus, is replete with policy implications.
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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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".