People with environmental sensitivities: Life, identity, and services
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study examines the realities and the experiences with regard to health and social services of people with environmental sensitivities (ES), also known as multiple chemical sensitivities (MCS). It also examines how health and social service providers understand this condition as well as their experiences with people with ES/MCS. The study aims to generate an understanding of, as well as a theory about the experiences and realities of people with ES/MCS alongside the understandings and experiences of service providers, analyzing the convergences and disjunctures. Within a qualitative grounded theory design and an eco-feminist perspective, individual interviews were completed with 16 people with ES/MCS (service users) and 16 service providers. Service users were interviewed about their health and social service experiences as well as their health and social service needs. They were also asked how they coped with having ES/MCS and how the condition affected their role in society. Service providers were asked about their understanding of the condition and their experiences in offering services to this population. It was found that service users with ES/MCS face multiple losses in their lives: social isolation, loss of identity, loss of housing, financial losses, and loss of family and friends. Service providers with the closest contact to people with ES/MCS mentioned these losses, but not all service providers described these losses at length. While some service users expressed a loss of identity, others described personal transformations. There was a range of positive and negative experiences in terms of health and social services as well as a range of understandings of the condition from the service providers' perspective. These experiences and understandings were framed within a grounded theory model that provided an explanation within three powerful paradigms that dominate our society: individualism, neo-liberalism and the biomedical model. The grounded theory model also helped explain the interconnections between the realities and the experiences of people with ES/MCS as well as the service providers' understandings of the condition. The implications of these findings and the grounded theory model are also discussed in terms of improving the education of health and social service providers as well as the public.
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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 | 0.002 | 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 | 0.011 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".