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 distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. 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.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".