Platonic parents: some preliminary findings and methodological reflections
Bibliographic record
Abstract
'Platonic parenting', also known as 'poly-parenting', refers to people who, either as individuals or couples, choose to raise children with someone else with whom they are not in an intimate relationship. This paper discusses an ongoing PhD research project which investigates the legal recognition of 'platonic parenting' within the LGBT community. The project compares the legal response to 'platonic parenting' in the UK and certain jurisdictions in Canada (namely British Columbia and Ontario) because of the divergent approach each jurisdiction takes to this issue. The current paper will focus on some of the preliminary findings resulting from the UK empirical study, which is nearing completion, as well as highlighting some methodological challenges that the study has faced. \n \nThe UK empirical study involved a combination of telephone and face-to-face interviews (approximately 12 in total) with adults who are or have considered raising children in this way as well as professionals (such as solicitors and fertility counsellors) who have experience of working with these families. Although the analysis of the results from this study is still at a very preliminary stage, several key findings have emerged. For example, both professional participants and people engaged in raising children in this way have highlighted the importance of clearly discussing expectations prior to birth and have emphasised the way that written agreements can achieve this despite being non-binding. Another important observation that a number of participants have made is the need for greater social (and legal) debate on this issue, which this project hopes to contribute to, as well as raising awareness of the legal issues faced by these families, not least among people considering parenting in this way. \n \nFinally, the paper will reflect on some methodological challenges the study has had to overcome, including the creative recruitment strategies necessary to recruit a sample from this hard-to-access group, whether to conduct joint or individual interviews and how to navigate issues of client confidentiality when interviewing solicitors and fertility counsellors. One of the issues this study has faced, as many small-scale qualitative studies do, has been deciding how many interviews would be enough to answer the research questions. Recent methodological literature, however, suggests that the number of interviews is not as important as the quality of analysis in terms of the specific research question. Therefore, this paper will reflect on the sample size as well as the quality of the data gathered during the interviews.
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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 | 0.139 | 0.123 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.014 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.018 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.002 |
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".