Narratives and the Water Fluoridation Controversy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Fluoridation is one of the most significant public health measures of the last century and yet also deeply controversial. Adding a small amount of fluoride in drinking water is a safe and relatively cheap approach to provide oral health in communities. But since its advent in the 1940s, there has been opposition to fluoridation, with a recent resurgence challenging some communities to stop the practice. The aim here is to explore some reasons why this happens, focusing on how different narratives can affect how people think about fluoridation. Some narratives are based on scientific fact, some on normative frames. Is each equally capable of affecting public opinion? Answers are sought through experimental survey questions whereby respondents are exposed to different narratives. This survey was administered in 2017 in both Canada and the United States, with a sample of more than 3400, possibly the largest survey that focuses on attitudes toward water fluoridation. Results suggest that although there is majority support for fluoridation, it is much easier to reduce that support than it is to increase it.
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 | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 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".