My Voices Heard: Participatory Action Research to Community Engagement of the Immigrant Seniors
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: The most common risk factors that increase the chances of immigrant seniors becoming socially isolated and vulnerable include lack of awareness of or access to resources, physical and mental health issues, and linguistic and socio-cultural barriers. Continuous hours of childminding further exacerbate the issue. The social isolation of seniors can cause higher social and financial costs. Method: Realizing the compounding challenge of social isolation and failure to bring attention to vulnerable seniors in engagement activities aiming to reduce their social isolation and improve physical and mental health, the Nepalese Community Society of Calgary (NCSC) implemented participatory action research (PAR) using focused group discussion (FGD) and expert mapping as key tools to find out the most pertinent activities for this group that would bring buy-in and increase a wider uptake. The FGDs were done with a diverse group of participants from June to Sept 2022: male elders (n = 44), female elders (n = 31), male and female elders together (n = 67), adults (n = 83), and seniors and household members together (n = 140), to capture different perspectives. The issues and activities identified through FGDs were prioritized following the scoring method (1 to 10 scale) with randomly selected elders (n = 55). The results obtained through prioritization were further scored by the member of the project steering committee (PSC) and the project staff (n = 21) handling projects to have a ground truth and make a prioritization methodologically more robust and prioritized activities have a potential of uptake. Finally, a weighted average was calculated for each issue and activity. Results and Conclusion: The results portray that socio-cultural activities stood to be a top priority to effectively engage seniors, help relieve their physical and mental stress, and pacify their craving for back home and which also bears the highest potential for intergenerational learning. Followed by this was the activity that mimics their lives back home: backyard gardening, as it makes them engaged with nature and transfer the culture to their offspring via agriculture. Senior meet and greet obtained the third highest score followed by the celebration of special days of the elders. The results from the participatory action research were an eye-opener for the community to start implementing a bottom-up approach while defining and refining engagement activities for the seniors. The degree of uptake in earlier activities (pre-prioritization) was poor while there has been a consistently higher rate of participation afterwards.
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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 | 0.076 | 0.045 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.018 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| 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".