Harm reduction with people who use psychoactive substances: social workers’ perceptions of harm reduction work and in implementing harm reduction work in their direct clinical practice in rural Central Ontario
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Harm reduction approaches to psychoactive substance use continue to be a highly politicized and polarizing topic in today’s society, even after several decades of ongoing discourse. Many social workers work for and with organizations that include harm reduction approaches to social work direct practice with individuals who use psychoactive substances. This qualitative study of six participants explores social workers’ perceptions of harm reduction work with individuals who use psychoactive substances and the ways in which they perceive the implementation and operationalization of harm reduction approaches in their direct practice in rural Central Ontario. A semi-structured interview design was used, with the research grounded in structural social work theory, as well as critical ecological theory and a person-centered perspective. Findings indicate that stigma of individuals who use psychoactive substances and associated harm reduction work is deeply rooted and reinforced within structural systems, organizations, and within social work and harm reduction work, itself. Social workers’ perception of harm reduction and it’s implementation cite organizational culture, social work as harm reduction work, and clinical barriers to implementation as main themes in the social work direct practice role, working with individuals who use psychoactive substances. Social workers are equipped to support harm reduction work through their social work worldview, and benefit from an organizational culture that both formally and informally supports harm reduction work. An aligned organizational culture and social work worldview can more effectively advocate for greater availability and accessibility of harm reduction programming and services. Implications for research, policy, and practice are discussed.
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 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 | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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".