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Becoming an Informant

2010· article· en· 28 citations· W2021148446 on OpenAlex· 10.1080/07418825.2010.506881

Why is this work in the frame?

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

Canadian funderA Canadian agency funded it. The work may carry no Canadian affiliation at all.

No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Direct model labels (unvalidated)

Per-model category and study-design labels from the labeling rounds. They are machine output, unvalidated, and the disagreement between models ships as data. No study design here is MEDLINE-validated yet.

gemmalow
Categories: no category
Study design: Qualitative
Domain: not available
Genre: Empirical
About the Canadian research system: no
About a Canadian topic: no
gptlow
Categories: no category
Study design: Qualitative
Domain: not available
Genre: Empirical
About the Canadian research system: no
About a Canadian topic: no

Full frame distilled prediction

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.

Candidate categories
none
Consensus categories
none
Domain
Candidate signal: noneConsensus signal: none
Study design
Candidate signal: QualitativeConsensus signal: Qualitative
Genre
Candidate signal: EmpiricalConsensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score
0.290
Threshold uncertainty score
0.978
Validation status
machine_predicted_unvalidated · codex-gemma-dda1882f352a

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0010.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.001
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0010.001

Machine scores (provisional)

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

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.

Opus teacher head0.048
GPT teacher head0.398
Teacher spread
0.350 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation status
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Abstract

Though widely acknowledged as vital to law enforcement, social scientists have largely ignored the practice of confidential informing. The extant literature on the topic is primarily comprised of experientially based practical guides to informant management and a handful of field studies drawing information from informants in the study of other undercover practices. This study features data obtained from in‐depth interviews with eighty‐four former informants drawn from five southern states identified through a purposive‐snowball sampling strategy. Informant accounts suggest that the practice of confidential informing is an institutionalized component of a general narcotics enforcement pattern characterized by duplicity and social control irony. Confidential informant work is observed as a moral career entailing deviant identity maintenance through neutralizations and insider perspective. Narratives confirmed a motivational typology accounting for role assumption and informant–agent dynamics and orient discussion around practice and research implications.

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.

The record

Venue
Justice Quarterly
Topic
Policing Practices and Perceptions
Field
Social Sciences
Canadian institutions
not available
Funders
Bureau of Justice AssistanceUniversity of Waterloo
Keywords
ConfidentialitySnowball samplingTypologyPsychologyInsiderSocial psychologyIdentity (music)Nonprobability samplingLaw enforcementSociologyPerspective (graphical)CriminologyPolitical scienceLaw
Has abstract in OpenAlex
yes