Social Work Doctoral Scholarship in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The nature and types of social work research generated in doctoral programs has been well-studied in the US. Doctoral programs in Canada, in comparison, are much younger; the first doctoral program was created in the mid-1970s. To date, there is no systematic understanding of the nature and types of knowledge produced within Schools and Faculties of Social Work. In this study we review 248 dissertations that were published in Canada between 2001 and 2011. Method: A database was created from a search of Canadian social work dissertations published between 2001-2011 using the ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Database (PQDT). To verify the sample, doctoral program directors were contacted and independently confirmed the sample names and dissertation titles by year. Full text dissertations were retrieved for review. Data pertaining to 12 research methodology variables (e.g., quantitative/qualitative/mixed method, presence/absence of hypothesis, primary or secondary data source, sample size, etc., see codebook) was extracted from each dissertation. Inter-rater reliability for a random selection of 1/3 of the cases was 0.82. Conflicts w ere resolved through consensus.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.007 | 0.035 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.028 | 0.071 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.025 | 0.006 |
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".