Professional ambivalence among care workers: The case of doula practice
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Doulas are non-medical, privately paid caregivers to women during pregnancy and childbirth, who have entered the maternity care field in recent decades. In a hospital setting, doulas offer women emotional and physical support that supplements clinical care. Drawing on focus groups and interviews with eight doulas working in one Atlantic Canadian city, along with Abbott and Merrabeau's analysis of the professionalization of 'caring' occupations, I consider how doulas navigate the uncertain terrain of their emerging occupation. In general, the work performed by care workers is viewed as an extension of the work women perform in the domestic sphere, for which they are understood to be 'naturally' talented. As a result, 'caring' occupations need to find ways to emphasize the value of their role and justify the need for adequate pay. While traditional processes of professionalization appear to offer a solution, the credentials associated with being a 'profession' - a monopoly over a field and a distinct body of (scientific) knowledge - may not be relevant when evaluating the quality of care provision. I argue that doulas hold ambivalent perspectives towards the nature of their training, the requirements of certification and 'appropriate' interactions with clients due to the broader tension between care work and professional ideology.
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.
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 | 0.010 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.001 |
| 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 it