More than chores: the invisible work of family caregivers in rural New Brunswick
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Canada, most home care for people living with chronic illness or disability is provided by informal, or unpaid, family members, the majority of whom are women (Romanow, 2002; Armstrong & Armstrong, 2010). The thesis explores the work of family caregivers who assist with a multitude of activities to maintain the home for the purpose of long-term care in the province of New Brunswick. Using Armstrong, Armstrong and Scott-Dixon’s (2008) concept of ‘ancillary health work’ – or activities like housekeeping and food service – that have been contracted out in institutional health settings, the thesis seeks to broaden the definition of health work performed by family caregivers at home. Activities such as property maintenance, home renovation as well as administrative tasks like acquiring medical equipment and filling out insurance forms are not considered ‘critical to care’ (Armstrong, Armstrong & Scott-Dixon, 2008) in home care policy, nor do they receive public funding. Yet interviews with family caregivers and frontline health and social services staff in New Brunswick illustrate the range of work required to maintain the interior and exterior of the home as a site of care. Drawing on qualitative, semi-structured interviews with 13 family caregivers and 11 frontline staff, the thesis sheds light on the amount and types of ancillary health work family caregivers provide as a part of a health system that extends beyond institutional walls. By categorizing the work of family caregivers as similar to daily housekeeping activities that take place in the home, governments promote and maintain gendered notions of care (Braedley & Luxton, 2010). In contrast, categorizing home maintenance and the administrative work involved in managing and coordinating home health supports as a part of the long-term care system provides critical analysis of the limitations of neoliberal ‘aging in place’ policies and the complex nature of home-based care in rural areas.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.029 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".