Autonomy as Conveyed by Food Environments: Nourishment vs Restriction Among Neurodiverse Older Adults
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Food serves as a lens to understand identity, memory, and belonging. However, in the context of care, food often reflects a mechanism of social control (Davies, 2007; Gerber, 2020). Feminist scholars have critiqued conceptualizations of autonomy as “self-sufficient independence” for overlooking how individuals and their contexts are intertwined (Salami & Lashewicz, 2015, p. 93). Narrow conceptualizations of autonomy, which emphasize functional independence, hold sway in many caregiving environments, shaping food experiences (Dickson et al., 2022; Boyle, 2008). This study explores food-related experiences among neurodiverse older adults (NDOA) in Quebec. We collected intersectional life story narratives (Brotman et al., 2021) of 21 neurodiverse older adults, 15 family caregivers, and 27 service providers about challenges encountered and agency enacted across the life course. Findings highlight the interplay between NDOAs’ food experiences, identities, memories, and relationships. Our observations reveal how formal and informal carers across sectors enact controls over food consumption, schedules, and daily choices, restricting NDOAs’ autonomy. We illuminate structures of dominance and expressions of resistance, highlighting how NDOAs internalize messages conveyed through their food experiences, leading to feelings of empowerment or constraint. Findings highlight how experiences of nourishment versus restriction affect neurodiverse people into older age. We encourage carers across settings to support autonomous eating to promote agency and well-being. Such inclusive recommendations would serve to safeguard NDOAs’ autonomy and rights.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".