Youth loneliness in pandemic times: a qualitative study in Quebec and Ontario
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In many countries, young adults have been the age group most affected by loneliness during the pandemic. While this phenomenon is now well quantified, we still lack a clear understanding of its causes, as well as of the main characteristics of this youth loneliness. We argue that a qualitative approach can help to capture the dynamics of youth loneliness during the pandemic: drawing on 48 life stories of young adults aged 18 to 30 conducted in 2020 and 2021 in Québec and Ontario, we identify the different hardships, emotions and coping strategies associated with loneliness. We show that beyond a common « shock of loneliness », this experience is associated with three main narratives -loneliness as an « abyss », a « battle » or a « resource »-, which sheds light on a process of « cumulative loneliness », affecting particularly the most vulnerable young people. The conclusion highlights some key lessons for research on youth loneliness.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| 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".