“Finally my turn to write my story”: A convergent mixed methods study exploring the perceptions and experiences of emerging adults who aged out of foster care in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Each year, thousands of young Canadians 'age out' of foster care on or before their 19th birthday. This abrupt transition to independence coincides with emerging adulthood (ages 18-29), a developmental period associated with transformational changes, including new or worsening mental health challenges. OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this study was to understand how emerging adults, who aged out of foster care in Canada, navigated their transition to independence, and specifically, how experiences of structural violence encountered pre- and post-emancipation may have influenced their mental health and capacity for positive adaptation. PARTICIPANTS AND SETTING: 203 emerging adults from across Canada took part in the quantitative arm of this study, with a subsample of 31 participants enrolled in the qualitative arm. Virtual methods (online survey and video conferencing) supported remote participation. METHODS: A convergent mixed methods design involved concurrent quantitative and qualitative data collection and analysis, followed by integration of emergent findings. The quantitative arm of the study consisted of an electronic questionnaire including sociodemographic characteristics, foster care histories, and ten validated measures. The qualitative arm involved virtual semi-structured interviews regarding participants' transition to independence upon aging out of care, including experiences and perceptions of structural violence, mental health challenges, and positive adaptation. RESULTS: Correlation analyses and regression modelling revealed relationships between and among structural violence, mental health challenges, and positive adaptation in this population. Nine qualitative themes uncovered the contextual nuances of participants' transition to independence. Two joint displays were developed to visually represent the integration of quantitative and qualitative data. CONCLUSIONS: By exploring this clinical issue from a combined socioecological, temporal, and intersectional perspective, key findings reflect its complexity, nuance, and transformative capacity. Integrated data may suggest approaches for future development of interventions to address the unique mental health care needs of this population.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".