The Role of Communication Technology Across the Life Course: A Field\n Guide to Social Support in East York
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We examine how Canadians living in the East York section of Toronto exchange\nsocial support. Just as we have had to deconstruct social support to understand\nits component parts, we now deconstruct how different types of communication\ntechnologies play socially supportive roles. We draw on 101 in-depth interviews\nconducted in 2013-2014 to shed light on the support networks of a sample of\nEast York residents and discern the role of communication technologies in the\nexchange of different types of social support across age groups. Our findings\nshow that not much has changed since the 1960s in terms of the social ties that\nour sample of East Yorkers have, and the types of support mobilized via social\nnetworks: companionship, small and large services, emotional aid, and financial\nsupport. What has changed is how communication technologies interweave in\ncomplex ways with different types of social ties (partners, siblings, friends,\netc.) to mobilize social support. We found that with siblings and extended kin\ncommunication technologies could boost the frequency of interaction and help\nexchange support at a distance. With friendship ties, communication\ntechnologies provide a continuous, constant flow of interaction. We draw\nimplications for theories of social support and for social policy linked to\ninterventions aimed at helping vulnerable groups during the COVID-19 pandemic.\n
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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 | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.001 |
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".