The Benefits of Abstract Functional Analysis in Theory Construction: The Case of Interdependence Theory
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this article I argue for the benefits of an abstract functional analysis in theory construction, suggesting that an understanding of the nature of situations of interdependence will provide theoretical insights into basic processes in interpersonal relations. That is, mechanisms and basic processes such as social cognition are best understood by describing their functional relation to the social problems with which they were designed to cope, rather than studying them in their own right in isolation from the purpose they serve. I discuss the tenets of ecological psychology, the scientific philosophy underpinning this way of thought. I then link this approach to the development of my own theoretical ideas on trust in close relationships, providing a description of how a functional analysis rooted in the assumptions of interdependence theory shaped the questions I posed and the answers to which I was drawn.
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 | 0.071 | 0.069 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.010 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.069 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.029 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| 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".