Beyond Cuddling Canines: Exploring Students’ Perceptions of the Importance of Touch in an On-Campus Canine-Assisted Intervention
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite the increasing popularity of canine-assisted interventions (CAIs) across a variety of contexts, there is a paucity of literature exploring participants’ perceptions of the mechanisms that contribute to the benefits reported by researchers. This study aimed to expand on the knowledge obtained by our Phase I findings and to better understand undergraduate participants’ ( N = 280) perceptions and experiences of direct, physical contact versus indirect, close contact with therapy dogs and spending time with therapy dog handlers alone. Participants’ responses revealed that direct contact with therapy dogs was more likely to elicit benefits in positive affect, including reducing stress and improving mood, than those in the indirect or handler-only groups. Conversely, spending time with the handlers only was more likely to elicit social benefits, such as feeling more connected and less homesick. These findings hold implications for post-secondary CAIs and for therapy dog programs.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".