Much ‘I do’ about nothing? The impact of South Africa’s Civil Union Act on media representations of marriage
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract With the Civil Union Act in 2006, South Africa passed the first national-level same-sex marriage legislation on the continent. Both proponents and opponents ascribed importance to this legislation based on the idea that it would fundamentally change the institution of marriage. Has the Civil Union Act changed the depiction of marriage in media, and by extension, changed representation of this institution in the public sphere? This article investigates marriage as it appears in South African media through an analysis of 736 English language newspaper articles from 2005–2011. We demonstrate that discourses around marriage changed in the short term, with more attention paid to sexual minorities. Over the medium term, however, there was no significant shift in media discussions of marriage, suggesting that the legislation did not significantly alter depictions of the institution of marriage in the public sphere.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".