Social Identity and Power: Older Adults as “Care Recipients” in Media Content on Family Care
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the context of normalized forms of elder abuse and neglect in Canada, it is important to examine how constructions of family caregivers in the public sphere (re)produce potentially harmful assumptions. In this paper, we examine mainstream media construction of the "caregiver" identity in advocacy-related coverage over a 6-year time period (2016-2021). Relying on abductive formal analysis, we explore how care for older adults is presented as largely burdensome and linked to what are labeled the "complex care needs" of a growing aging population that is erroneously presented as largely incapacitated or incompetent. In particular, the emphasis and confusion generated around the indiscriminate use of the disease label of "dementia" functions to emphasize burden, particularly for women and women's liberation more broadly while simultaneously dehumanizing older persons and ignoring various well-documented and socially generated causes of cognitive impairment. Our analysis suggests that reliance on the caregiver identity contributes to the marginalization of older adults and perpetuates ageism while obscuring multiple system failures that harm older persons and strain families' ability to be responsive to elders' needs.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".