A Qualitative Analysis of the Resettlement Experiences of Refugee Claimants in Hamilton, Ontario
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis explores the relationship between restrictive screening techniques imposed by landlords and the ability of refugee claimants to access housing in a medium-sized Canadian city. While existing research has explored refugees’ experiences with resettlement, few have focused specifically on refugee claimants who arrive in their destination country with specific health needs, limited resources, and access to different services compared to other entry categories. Using qualitative research techniques, this study sought to better understand the experiences of refugee claimants as they search for housing in a medium-sized Canadian city. Through interviews with service providers, volunteers, and refugee claimants themselves, three main themes were identified. First, we explore the relationship between a competitive housing market and the ability of landlords to be selective about who they rent to. Our findings suggest that the power imbalance between landlords, tenants and applicants is only amplified in a competitive market and allows landlords to choose applicants based on their own personal biases. Second, participants identified strict rental applications as the primary mechanism used by landlords to filter applications and identify tenants that they deemed to be “desirable”, while excluding other groups. In many cases, refugee claimants were found to be uniquely (and negatively) impacted by this practice because they often do not have the personal or financial resources available to successfully fill out these applications. Finally, participants identified two structural barriers which hindered a refugee claimants’ ability to access housing and, when combined with strict rental applications, often resulted in their exclusion from housing. This thesis is relevant to the current Canadian context, given the government’s continued commitment to resettling refugees and the increasingly competitive housing markets across Canada. Overall, this thesis adds to the existing literature regarding the resettlement experiences of refugee claimants and their ability to access housing in a medium-sized Canadian city.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".