The Complexities of Navigating Social Supports: Impacts on Low-Income Lone Mothers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study explores how low-income lone mothers in Ottawa, Ontario, navigate Canada’s complex, multi-sector networks of social supports in their work to meet their families’ needs. Drawing on reflective thematic analysis of in-depth interviews and text message-based data with 25 mothers, the study illuminates how systems organized to meet basic needs are often experienced as stressful and deflating, stigmatizing, and even risky. Mothers described the labour of accessing supports as extensive, with physical, bureaucratic, relational, and emotional dimensions, and as compounding feelings of shame, undermining trust in the state, and constraining their socio-economic mobility. The findings show how certain aspects of social service design and delivery fail to meet needs and can entrench poverty and erode social bonds. Participants also identified elements that can foster a sense of support and connection, such as services that are reliable, flexible, co-located, coordinated, and relational. These findings underscore the need to reimagine social support delivery to value provisioning labour, reduce systemic harms, and address the structural conditions that sustain poverty.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| 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".