Institutional care for children in Trinidad and Tobago: Toward a new model of care for developing countries
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Children around the world need care outside their families for a variety of reasons including poverty, war and epidemics such as HIV/AIDS. The majority of these children live in developing countries where there are limited resources to care for them. As a result of concerns about the effects of institutional care on children, and following trends in the developed world, there is a movement in developing countries to replace large residential institutions with a system of adoption, foster care and small group homes. The aim of this study is to examine the experience of orphan, abandoned, and neglected or abused children who grew up in residential institutions in the Caribbean nation of Trinidad and Tobago, to learn the positives and negatives of residential care in order to contribute to developing a model of care suited for high need, low resource countries. Oral history methodology was used to collect the stories of 24 alumni (12 men and 12 women) from seven homes in Trinidad and Tobago. The homes were categorized as 1) state— partially funded by the state but managed by the Anglican and Catholic dioceses, 2) faith-based— run by religious communities, and 3) community homes run by individuals in the community. The findings of the study show that overall experiences were positive. For poor and working-class children, life in the home was better than their life would have been if they had remained with their families. However, discharge and transition from the homes were less favourable. Alumni from the state-funded homes experienced more difficulties than the faith-based and community homes as a result of poor planning and a lack of post-departure supports. Women suffered more hardships than men, often leading to sexual exploitation. The findings also show that being admitted with siblings and staying at the same home over the duration of care—as was the norm—correlated positively with educational outcomes for the majority of alumni. Some life-long relationships were maintained with volunteers and with friends made among peers at the homes. The study concludes that large group care is not necessarily harmful for children. It may be even beneficial and may be cost effective—a factor that is very important for low resource countries. An aftercare plan, with planning beginning at admission might ease the transition process and gender must be considered in discharge and transition policies.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".