What Is Informal Social Control? A Concept Consensus Review of Recent Criminological Literature
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Is there consensus among criminologists about the meaning of informal social control? Some prominent criminologists say no. We conduct a concept consensus review of all articles using the term in the top 10 journals in criminology from 2010 to 2020 to test their dissensus assertion. We found 597 articles that mention informal social control. Of the 228 articles where the term was important to the study, only 41 attempt to define the concept. We assessed each conceptual definition using four definitional elements: subject, action, object, and reason. One or more elements were missing from most conceptual definitions. Combining the mode of the most specified elements, informal social control may mean “residents intervening with youth/children to reduce crime.” But dissensus is more common than consensus; authors differ on who applied controls, what those controls were, who was controlled, or the reasons for the control. This raises questions about how to proceed with the study of informal social control.
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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 | 0.071 | 0.123 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.035 | 0.022 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.016 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".