The Experiences of Service Providers Who Care for Homeless Pregnant or Early Parenting Women
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BackgroundHomelessness among women and children is a growing concern, shaped by intersecting structural inequities. Service providers working with women who are homeless, particularly those who are pregnant and/or parenting young children, navigate complex responsibilities that span legal, medical, housing, child welfare, and psychosocial domains. These responsibilities are often carried out in under-resourced environments and in response to trauma rooted in systemic injustice. A feminist pragmatist perspective recognizes the relational, embodied, and context-specific nature of this work, and values the insights of direct care providers as essential to shaping equitable and responsive care.PurposeOur study purpose is to deepen our understanding of the ethical tensions and emotional and embodied labor inherent in the work of service providers who work with pregnant and/or parenting women who are homeless, while advocating for structural reforms that support both client outcomes and provider well-beingMethodsThis study is part of a larger community-based research initiative. This article draws on a subset of data from 22 semi-structured interviews and two focus groups with service providers, including social workers, nurses, nurse practitioners, psychologists, corrections staff, outreach workers, and health administrators. Data were analyzed thematically, guided by feminist pragmatist principles that center experience, reflexivity, and practical action.ResultsFindings reveal persistent systemic barriers to care, including inadequate housing, fragmented services, and institutionalized discrimination. Despite these challenges, service providers expressed a deep sense of purpose and fulfillment in their work, rooted in relational engagement, advocacy, and bearing witness to the resilience of the women they support.ConclusionAwareness of the human condition and a commitment to relational, justice-oriented care are central to effective service delivery. Health systems must prioritize equity and justice, ensuring that nurses and service providers are empowered and supported as advocates for pregnant and/or parenting women who are homeless.
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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 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| 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".