"What is work?”: Perspectives of low-income young adults who use psychoactive substances and participate in a harm reduction-based low-threshold work program
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Background. Young adults in situations of social precarity are more exposed to the risks associated with both unemployment and psychoactive substance use. Low-threshold work is a promising alternative for this cohort, yet it has been little studied to date. This qualitative study describes the significance of both work in general and low-threshold work for these individuals. Methods. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 23 young adults who had participated in a low-threshold work program. The interviews were transcribed and subsequently analyzed thematically, filtered through a life course theory perspective. Results. Participants defined “work” as remunerated activity carried out within a formalized framework. The meanings they ascribed to work were somewhat negative, marked by prior experiences of abuse and exploitation. Precarious living conditions were also difficult to reconcile with the routines of full-time employment. However, a different set of meanings was ascribed to low-threshold work. Beyond representing temporary economic relief, it was experienced positively on a number of fronts and categorized by participants as distinctive from what they called “real work.” Conclusion. Low-threshold work as a harm reduction-based intervention strategy presents a number of potential benefits that include the chance to form lasting relationships, gain exposure to enjoyable work, and be supported in a process of change liable to promote the achievement of certain goals. A broadened definition of work that extends beyond the notion of productivity, as is programs like TAPAJ, could thus provide young people in situations of social precarity with more rewarding income-generating opportunities in addition to fostering feelings of achievement.
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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 | 0.010 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| 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".