Don't let things you have done define you!: An anti-oppressive constructivist study of youth voices defining wellness
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Problem Statement How health is defined and subsequently measured impacts programming. Who defines adaptive behaviour influences validation of youth mental health. Psychocentric discourses emphasize the “at-risk youth,” pathologizing individual behaviours and outcomes. Professionals devise definitions of youth wellness, rarely consulting with youth. Methods My study explored how youth from a small Canadian city define wellness within personal, relational, collective, and structural domains, to inform theory and practice around youth health strategies. Charmaz’s Constructivist Grounded Theory method was used. A critical, anti-oppressive theoretical approach identified power dynamics impacting youth wellness. Dialogical Action Theory framed pragmatic policy recommendations. Sampling was purposeful in locations where youth were present and snowballing used for recruitment. There were 16 youth aged 16 to 23 years with functional literacy of English, eligible to participate in semi-structured interviews (16) and two sets of focus groups (4). Results Youth self-identified by gender: six boys, six girls, and four gender diverse. Fifteen provided individual definitions of wellness; focus groups produced two co-created definitions. A holistic, ecologic model of meta-themes is a theoretical contribution to defining youth wellness. At the Personal Level, wellness was associated with competence, creativity, mindfulness, and self-care. At the Relational Level, wellness was promoted through positive friendships, empathetic kin, and non-judgemental “close” adults. Wellness at the Communal Level involved mental health supports, youth-friendly “safe spaces,” altruism, and social justice causes. These youth of the postmodern Information Age provided a wealth of practical advice around youth mental health, discrimination and stigma, safety, social media, substance use and homelessness. Policy recommendations include mediating wellness through early detection of languishing (e.g., depression, anxiety, and disordered eating); fostering empowerment through wellness literacy and youth voices in policy and program development; creating healing-centred engagement youth hubs; providing critical literacy skills to further social justice; and protecting the vulnerable and marginalized. Conclusion Of concern is the prevalence of stigma associated with mental health and substance use challenges and intergenerational trauma experienced by youth in this study. Youth wellness calls for whole-person restorative healing interventions, also extended to families and communities, given the collective nature of supports needed to foster healthy youth development.
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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 | 0.025 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".