The Symphonic Passion Chorus: \nA Case Study in Meaning-Centered Service Design
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Organizations that provide services for adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) struggle to provide meaningful participation for their constituents. IDD adults experience higher rates of loneliness and isolation than the general population—a situation that the COVID-19 pandemic further exacerbated. However, in contrast to these difficulties and trends, the Symphonic Passion Chorus, a musical choir for adults with IDD in Toronto, has supported song learning and socialization for its members for the past 19 years. \n \nIncredibly, despite challenges such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the choir maintained a stable membership supported by a resilient community, even overcoming Information and Communication Technology (ICT) barriers through home-grown and community-generated workarounds. \n \nTo better understand factors that contribute to the choir's longevity, resiliency, and ability to overcome barriers, we employed a qualitative research design consisting of semi-structured interviews, field observations, and thematic analysis, revealing how the choir can be understood as an intrinsically meaningful (rewarding for its own sake) coordinative art form that draws members together, thus fostering cohesion: E.g., members described being motivated by opportunities for creative expression and shared purposes, which inspired them to self-organize to develop ICT-based adaptations and workarounds in response to pandemic-related challenges to maintain connections to each other and the intrinsic rewards of the choir. \n \nOur findings suggest that the choir's self-regulating feedback loops are akin to a complex adaptive system, which can provide insights for improving adaptable and resilient supports for the adult IDD population. \nInformed by these findings, we offer recommendations for 1. Meaning-Centered Design (MCD), which we conceptualize as integrating intrinsically meaningful activities with the core service activities of an organization; 2. Embedding participatory research into organizational activities to reveal emergent community-driven innovation that supports organizational aims that fall outside of official organizational mandates. \n \nOur findings, MCD conceptual model and recommendations serve as a framework for developing inclusive, resilient, and adaptive services that enhance the well-being of individuals and communities.
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 | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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".