‘To recover a sense of the sacred in ourselves and in everything around us’: Exploring the place of spirituality in Canadian health promotion
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The field of health promotion advocates a socioecological approach to health which addresses a wide variety of physical, social, environmental, political and cultural factors. Encouraging a holistic approach, health promotion examines many aspects of health and well-being, including physical, mental, sexual, community, social and ecological health. Despite this holism, there is a noticeable absence of discussion surrounding spirituality and spiritual health in the discipline of health promotion. For this thesis project, I was interested in exploring how leading scholars in the field of health promotion, in Canada, understand the place of spirituality in health promotion. Using the fourth edition of Health Promotion in Canada (Rootman et al., 2017) as my sampling frame of recognized leaders in the field, I conducted thirteen semi-structured qualitative interviews with authors from the book. Situated within a critical health promotion approach which utilizes methodologies aiming for social justice, equity and ecological sustainability, I intend to open up possibilities for centering spiritual epistemologies and other ways of knowing that have been marginalized, such as Indigenous understandings of health and wellbeing. I argue that by avoiding spirituality within health promotion frameworks and education, the secularism of health promotion and its underlying values of Eurocentric knowledge production and science remain invisible and rarely critiqued. The absence of spirituality in health promotion signifies the ongoing colonialism of the field. This must be addressed if health promotion is to respond effectively to the calls to action from the Truth & Reconciliation Commission (2015), and if health promotion is to fulfill its promise of being inclusive, relevant and effective.
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 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 | 0.007 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.051 | 0.036 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| 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".