The Spatial Dimensions of Volunteer Spaces as Third Places: A Scoping Review Protocol
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Older adults are a growing group of the population and play vital roles in sustaining communities through volunteering. However, participation in volunteering among older adults in Canada has declined, highlighting the need to better understand the spaces and contexts that support and sustain volunteering in later life. This scoping review aims to synthesized what is known about how volunteer spaces function as third places, informal community-based settings that foster social connection and belonging outside of home and work, and how these spaces contribute to social inclusion among older adults. The review will follow methodological framework proposed by Arksey and O’Malley (2005) and be reported according to PRISMA-ScR guidelines. A systematic search will be conducted across PsycINFO OVID, Sociological Abstracts, Scopus and Web of Science, complemented by grey literature and hand searching. Findings will be analyzed thematically to map how volunteer spaces are conceptualized and experiences as third places and to identify characteristics that support social inclusion. Results will inform community organizations, policymakers and researchers interested in leveraging volunteer spaces to promote social connection in aging populations.
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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 | 0.126 | 0.119 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.014 | 0.013 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.028 | 0.019 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.007 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.010 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.066 | 0.014 |
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".