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.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".