The emergence of harm reduction in Canadian social work: scoping themes for practice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis contains two separate manuscripts linked by a common objective of unearthing a better understanding of how harm reduction is, and can be, applied effectively in practice by social workers in Canada. The first manuscript outlines the theoretical underpinnings of harm reduction’s emergence in Canada. It contrasts harm reduction with traditional social worker roles in responding to people who are ‘deviant,’ with a focus on people who use drugs. The paper offers an understanding of harm reduction as a space within the confinement of Susan Sontag’s ‘special worlds’ for ‘the sick’ and asks how social workers can utilize harm reduction in their practice. The second manuscript is a multi-disciplinary scoping review of academic literature that examines what has been published about harm reduction in relation to Canadian social work practice. The thesis ends with practice, policy, and research recommendations
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 | 0.083 | 0.125 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.017 | 0.040 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.027 | 0.035 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.033 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.006 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| 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".