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Record W4400853911 · doi:10.1007/s12108-024-09632-4

Theory Figures and Causal Claims in Sociology

2024· article· en· W4400853911 on OpenAlex
Gordon Brett, Daniel Silver

Why this work is in the frame

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

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueThe American Sociologist · 2024
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicContemporary Sociological Theory and Practice
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Toronto
Fundersnot available
KeywordsArrowEpistemologyCausal modelCausal analysisSociologyCausal theory of referenceRepresentation (politics)Causal structureCausality (physics)Sociology of knowledgeCausal reasoningCognitionPsychologySocial scienceLawEconometricsPhilosophyComputer sciencePolitical scienceEconomics

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract When sociologists examine the content of sociological knowledge, they typically engage in textual analysis. Conversely, this paper examines the relationship between theory figures and causal claims. Analyzing a random sample of articles from prominent sociology journals, we find several notable trends in how sociologists both describe and visualize causal relationships, as well as how these modes of representation interrelate. First, we find that the modal use of arrows in sociology are as expressions of causal relationship. Second, arrow-based figures are connected to both strong and weak causal claims, but that strong causal claims are disproportionately found in U.S. journals compared to European journals. Third, both causal figures and causal claims are usually central to the overarching goals of articles. Lastly, the strength of causal figures typically fits with the strength of the textual causal claims, suggesting that visualization promotes clearer thinking and writing about causal relationships. Overall, our findings suggest that arrow-based figures are a crucial cognitive and communicative resource in the expression of causal claims.

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.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.006
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesScience and technology studies
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.120
Threshold uncertainty score0.985

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0060.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0010.018
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.056
GPT teacher head0.392
Teacher spread0.336 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it