Connecting families: a qualitative study examining the experiences of parenting young children under financial strain in Ontario, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: There is little research investigating the subjective experiences of parenting young children while living in poverty and experiencing financial strain using qualitative methodologies. Therefore, the objective of this study was to employ a qualitative approach to provide a nuanced and balanced view on the topic of parenting young children under financial strain in the Canadian context. METHODS: We conducted a qualitative study using semi-structured interviews between July and August 2021 in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. Sixteen participants aged 20-39 self-identified as living under financial strain while parenting a child aged 2-5 years. A qualitative inductive thematic analysis was undertaken with a focus on describing the contents of the data. RESULTS: Four major themes emerged from the data: experience of being a parent, impact of financial strain on the family unit, impact of financial strain on the children, and impact of financial strain on the parent. Numerous deleterious physical, mental, and material impacts on the family unit and parent were identified, however parent-perceived impacts of financial strain on their children were minimal. Parents described striking levels of resourcefulness and resiliency in providing the necessities for their families, absorbing the most significant impacts of financial strain through the phenomenon of self-sacrifice. CONCLUSION: The impacts of financial strain on families with young children are far reaching. Further research into the impacts of self-sacrifice on parents experiencing financial strain are needed to better understand this issue, and to inform social programming and resources that could help alleviate the deleterious impacts of poverty on parent mental, social, and physical health.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".