Care's ultimate limits: experiences and accounts of caring for a relative or friend who died of breast cancer
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As patterns of cancer mortality continue to intersect with reallocations of work in the health sector, informal care for people dying of cancer is becoming an increasingly significant feature of social life in Canada. The experience of caring for someone who is dying is an area of relative silence in feminist analyses of informal care. This thesis outlines the imperatives of care generated in a palliative context, imperatives that are both felt at a personal level and linked to wider social structures and processes. The value assigned to closeness with the ill person can be seen to reflect cultural injunctions towards a ‘good death’ and to shape informal carers' perceptions of their labour. The implications of welfare retrenchment for the informal care sector is well established in the feminist literature. Yet few accounts consider the microsociological mechanisms that link informal carers' actions and accounts with conditions in social systems. In this thesis, carers' views of health professionals' work circumstances emerged as such a mechanism. Respondents' perceptions that health professionals were ‘run off their feet’ generally released professionals from routine care duties and from caring, in an affective sense, for patients. Informal carers were thus drawn into a range of activities whereby they both provided care and acted as bridges between patient needs and professional care. The belief that health professionals were ‘doing everything they could’ in conditions of constraint also tended to exonerate them from blame for the suffering that carers or ill people experienced, and thus to disarm complaints about health care. This analysis confirms, and extends into the institutional care sector, feminist accounts of the erosion of entitlement that accompanies current trends in western health systems. This thesis also augments collective understandings of the ethical complexities of qualitative research, offering an analysis of the ways vulnerability may be produced for research participants by the intersection of interview factors with particular discursive surrounds. This conceptualisation of the conditions of interviewee vulnerability prompts a revisioning of the power that researchers bring to and exercise in qualitative research interviews.
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 | 0.007 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| 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".