The “Fire Family”: A qualitative Exploration of the Volunteer Firefighter Organizational Culture and Social Support System In Rural Communities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The organizational culture and social support system of the fire family provides an opportunity to explore internal strengths within the volunteer fire service to address the unique mental health needs of volunteer firefighters. Nine frontline firefighters from three rural fire departments in Nova Scotia, Canada, participated in a series of three interviews that included photo-elicitation as part of this qualitative study. Twenty fire officers from the participating fire departments also participated in three separate focus groups. One fire officer participated in an individual interview. The study sought to examine features within the volunteer fire service's occupational environment that create either opportunities or barriers to mental wellness. One of the prevalent themes that emerged was the concept of the fire family as an integral aspect of the organizational culture as well as a significant social support system for morale and wellness. This paper starts with a review of the existing literature on the volunteer fire service organizational culture and social support systems, including peer support. The paper moves to a qualitative exploration and understanding of both the opportunities and barriers of the fire family structure. It concludes with a discussion on the need to increase existing social support capacity and mental health knowledge through the fire family structure within the rural volunteer fire service to better address the mental health needs of this population. Keywords: Volunteer firefighters, peer support, mental health, social support, organizational culture, rural communities __________________________________________________________________ La « famille des pompiers » : une exploration qualitative de la culture organisationnelle et du système de soutien social des pompiers volontaires en milieu rural La culture organisationnelle et le système de soutien social de la famille des pompiers volontaires offrent l’occasion d’explorer les forces internes des services d’incendie volontaires afin de répondre à leurs besoins uniques en matière de santé mentale. Neuf pompiers de première ligne de trois services d’incendie ruraux de la Nouvelle-Écosse, au Canada, ont participé à une série de trois entrevues, incluant la photo-élicitation, dans le cadre de cette étude qualitative. Vingt pompiers des services d’incendie participants ont également participé à trois groupes de discussion distincts. Un pompier a participé à une entrevue individuelle. L’étude visait à examiner les caractéristiques de l’environnement professionnel des services d’incendie volontaires qui créent des opportunités ou des obstacles au bien-être mental. L’un des thèmes dominants qui a émergé était le concept de la famille des pompiers comme partie intégrante de la culture organisationnelle et comme système de soutien social important pour le moral et le bien-être. Cet article commence par un examen de la littérature existante sur la culture organisationnelle et les systèmes de soutien social des services d’incendie volontaires, y compris le soutien par les pairs. L'article passe à une exploration qualitative et à compréhension des opportunités et des obstacles liés à la structure familiale des pompiers. Il conclut par une discussion sur la nécessité d'accroître les capacités de soutien social et les connaissances en santé mentale au sein des services de pompiers volontaires ruraux, grâce à la structure familiale des pompiers, afin de mieux répondre aux besoins de cette population en matière de santé mentale. Mots-clés : Pompiers volontaires, soutien par les pairs, santé mentale, soutien social, culture organisationnelle, communautés rurales
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 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".