An ethnographic study on the oral health and access to oral healthcare of Indigenous people in Montreal
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Although the population of Indigenous people living in urban centres has significantly increased over the past decades, limited research exists about their oral health and access to oral health services.We thus know very little about their perspectives, experiences, and needs concerning oral health.However, this knowledge is needed to guide oral health policies and service delivery for urban Indigenous people.Objectives: Our objectives were to (i) understand how urban Indigenous people perceived and experienced oral health and (ii) describe their oral healthcare pathway, including their experiences with dental professionals. Methodology:We conducted a focused ethnography, a useful and practical approach that is sensitive to cultural and social diversity and enables researchers to understand how people from certain cultures integrate health beliefs and practices into their lives.We organized individual indepth interviews with a purposeful sample of 20 Indigenous people living in Montreal, Québec.The interviews were in English, lasted approximately 90 minutes, and were audio-recorded to be transcribed verbatim and analyzed.In addition, we conducted participant observation of various Indigenous cultural events and health conferences in Montreal.Field notes were taken during these events and analyzed.The data analytic process comprised several stages, including summarizing the text, coding it into categories, and merging these categories to create themes. Findings:The participants had a bicultural perception of oral health, although the Western perspective seemed to dominate the Indigenous culture.Through the Indigenous lens, participants tended to understand oral health around the concepts of holism and balance.According to them, good oral health was important to achieve well-being and equilibrium between the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual aspects of life.Applied to oral health, participants emphasized eating and drinking in moderation to maintain equilibrium and stressed the role of teeth in eating
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".