Pandemic Stories: The Voices of Older Adults
Bibliographic record
Abstract
To document the reactions and experiences of older persons during the COVID-19 pandemic, we have conducted a qualitative study of 25 older adults (50 years of age and older) throughout the pandemic, using serial interviewing methods. This analysis reports on the data collected from the first two rounds of interviews - one conducted in the summer of 2020 and one conducted in the fall of 2020. Our thematic analysis found eight major themes: thoughts on the dangers of the pandemic, how the virus has changed daily life (including social life), health care during COVID (being a caregiver, losing a loved one, seeking health care), missing spontaneity and dealing with existential dread, the growing frustration, seeking connection through civic participation, adaptation and resilience, and the social ills that the pandemic has revealed. These stories describe both loneliness and connection, hope coupled with disappointment, but overwhelmingly, an insight into what the pandemic has shown us about the social ills that it has revealed.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".