On the Journey: a qualitative study of a community-based, client-centred eating disorder recovery group
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Community-based eating disorder (ED) treatment frequently includes manualized group-based psychoeducation facilitated by a mental health clinician. Body Brave, a non-profit ED organization, developed a novel, participant-guided, community-based virtual healthcare provider (HCP)-facilitated support program called On the Journey (OtJ). The program was designed for people with longstanding EDs who had previously participated in group or individual ED programs but require continued support in their recovery. The purpose of the study was to describe the development and components of OtJ and to understand participant perceptions of the program and its effect on their recovery. Using a formative and community-engaged research design, we conducted semi-structured interviews with three OtJ facilitators and focus groups with twelve OtJ clients. Transcripts were analyzed using Braun and Clarke’s six-stage approach to reflexive thematic analysis. Four main themes were generated from the data (1) “Designing and Evolving OtJ” (2) “Is OtJ a Treatment or Support Group?” (3) “Fostering a Safe Environment throughout Program Delivery” and (4) “The Power of Lived Experience.” Clients noted several strengths of the OtJ program: fostering a sense of community, valuing client autonomy, and providing accessible ED support. Key considerations for other organizations looking to offer programming similar to OtJ include having skilled and clinically trained facilitators and prescreening discussion topics to ensure that conversations are productive towards recovery. OtJ supports people with longstanding EDs, and other organizations could consider adopting a similar model of care. This study contributes to the growing body of including lived ED experience in research. On the Journey (OtJ) is a community-based eating disorder (ED) support program that is facilitated by healthcare providers. It was created by Body Brave, a non-profit organization from Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. This program is for people who have had an ED for at least two years and want low barrier support from a qualified clinician and others facing similar struggles as they continue to recover. This study describes the creation and implementation of OtJ and describes themes from interviews of clinicians and focus groups with clients of the program. Four main themes were identified (1) “Designing and Evolving OtJ” (2) “Is OtJ a Treatment or Support Group?” (3) “Fostering a Safe Environment throughout Program Delivery” and (4) “The Power of Lived Experience.” Other ED organizations could consider implementing a similar program for their clients with longstanding EDs looking who are seeking accessible support.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| 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".