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On the prospect and precarity of rural older voluntarism

2025· article· en· W4416615652 on OpenAlexafffundabout
Mark W. Skinner, Amber Zapletal, Erika Snowden, Elizabeth M. Russell

Bibliographic record

VenueGeoforum · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicNonprofit Sector and Volunteering
Canadian institutionsTrent University
FundersSocial Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
KeywordsVoluntarism (philosophy)PrecarityContext (archaeology)Rural areaPandemicFocus groupOlder people

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Volunteers are essential to supporting vulnerable older people in underserviced communities. Evidence is emerging, however, of the growing precarity of volunteering in small towns and rural places where most volunteers are older residents themselves. To advance knowledge on this phenomenon of ‘rural older voluntarism’, particularly in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, this article presents a case study of three volunteer-based programs in rural Ontario, Canada. Interviews and focus group discussions with 56 volunteers and program administrators reveal both the prospect and precarity of rural older voluntarism, shedding light on how the pandemic acted as a catalyst of change for individual volunteers, volunteer-based programs and ageing rural communities alike. Learning from the experiences both of older volunteers and administrators at volunteer-based programs in ageing rural communities can advance best practices for future-proofing the pivotal role of voluntarism for communities undergoing unprecedented changes such as natural disasters, economic upheaval and public health emergencies.

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.631
Threshold uncertainty score0.935

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0010.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.008
GPT teacher head0.279
Teacher spread0.271 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designObservational
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations1
Published2025
Admission routes3
Has abstractyes

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