An Analysis of Child and Youth Advocacy in 21st Century Contemporary Contexts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis explores how meanings of the concept of advocacy are produced by organizational structural features; how the concept of advocacy is constructed and related to young people's experiences by provincial and territorial child and youth advocate offices; how concepts of advocacy come to have significance in the lives of advocates and how they negotiate these concepts in their daily routines; and how children's rights are operationalized in practice in advocate offices.A total of 26 participants are included in the study.Through semi-structured interviews, I engage primarily with provincial and territorial child and youth advocates from across Canada as well as international children's commissioners from Australia, New Zealand, Belgium, Denmark, Norway and Northern Ireland.Two internationally recognized children's rights advocates are also included in the study.Adopting a qualitative methodology, I draw on organizational theory to make meaning of the data.My research reveals that the concept of advocacy is complex.Effective advocacy centres on challenging and changing decision-making processes by partnering with young people to elevate their perspectives and adopting a rights-based approach to working with children and youth.At the provincial and territorial level, it is important for advocates to navigate the historical, cultural and political factors that inform discourses surrounding childhood as these factors impact the way advocacy is carried out.At the organizational level, collaborative relationships with community organizations, government and interdisciplinary advocate teams help to operationalize rights in advocate offices.Findings point to the importance of thinking critically about the concepts of voice, agency and participation in the context of child and youth advocacy institutions.Understandings about children, voice, agency, participation iii and rights materialize certain groups of children in practice and frequently hinder the viewpoints of young people.Contained within these understandings are processes of exclusion, that may harm some children when considering who gets to have a voice or participate?While the advocates do good things for children, a shift is required in social institutions for children that has a lot to do with a conceptual shift in thinking about these concepts and how advocacy is carried out in 21 st century contexts.Special thanks to my exceptional supervisor, Dr. Dale Spencer.I knew my life was going to change the day you became my supervisor.You have gone above and beyond to support me, encourage me, challenge me, and most importantly, remind me that I can accomplish and achieve anything that I put my mind to.I would not be where I am today without your knowledge and mentorship and I am honoured to have had the privilege to work with a supervisor who cares so deeply about the success and wellbeing of his students.You are an academic wizard and are making a real difference in the lives of graduate students.Thank you to Dr. Melanie Adrian, Dr. Virginia Caputo, and Dr. Stefania Maggi for your helpful feedback, support and
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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 | 0.008 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.023 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| 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".