“I Don’t Really Have Many”: Student Parents Navigating Social Supports
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Drawing on the social support hypothesis, this paper examines social supports available to a sample of student parents in a small city in Southern Ontario and how they experienced and valued those supports. Our wider research project investigated the experiences of young student parents enrolled in an alternative high school, particularly looking at the effectiveness of a newly introduced mentorship program. Following protocols approved by our university’s Research Ethics Board, we conducted up to three qualitative, semi-structured, one-on-one interviews with 11 female student parents before, during, and after the summer closure of their high school program (29 interviews in total), most of whom were working-class, white, and heterosexual. In this study, we explore three questions: (1) what challenges do student parents experience in their daily lives; (2) when and where do student parents receive supports, and what form do these supports take; and (3) how do student parents perceive and value these supports? Using thematic analysis, we identified that participants experienced daily challenges due to a lack of mental health supports, adequate housing, childcare, and time. Six spheres of social support were shared by most of our participants: friendships, family members, intimate relationships, relationship with child/ren, mentorship, and program support. These spheres provided a variety of the three types of support distinguished by the social support hypothesis (i.e., emotional/social, tangible, and informational). Implications for the design of programs aiming to meaningfully support the well-being of student parents are discussed.
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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 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".