Trajectories of food bank use among new users in Quebec, Canada: Evidence from the pathways study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
PURPOSE: This study describes trajectories of food bank (FB) use among new users in relation with change in food insecurity status. METHODS: The Pathways Study followed 1001 new FB users across four regions of Québec, Canada, over a two-year period, from September 2018 to January 2020. Participants reported past-month FB use in two consecutive interviews following a baseline assessment, leading to 24 consecutive measures of monthly FB use. Household food insecurity was measured using the Household Food Security Survey Module. Group-based trajectory analysis was used to identify trajectories of FB use. RESULTS: Six trajectories were identified, including chronic use (30 % of the sample), infrequent use (11 %), withdrawal after recruitment (22 %), fast withdrawal (14 %), slow withdrawal (15 %), and intermittent (8 %). Chronic FB usage was associated with lower education levels and rural residency, suggesting economic challenges and limited opportunities in such areas. About a third of FB users changed their status from food insecure at baseline to food secure at the end of follow-up. CONCLUSIONS: These findings challenge the perception of FB users as a homogenous group and emphasize the need for tailored approaches to address food insecurity.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".