The Promise and Problem of "Closure" in Death Investigations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article reviews the concept of “closure” in the context of death investigations. It focuses on the experiences of bereaved families and justice system professionals, and on inquests undertaken by coroners under the Anglo-Canadian-Australasian model. The article shows the promise of closure figures prominently in coronial rhetoric: that the function of an inquest in facilitating closure has become an orthodox aspect of the promotion of the therapeutic advantages of coronial investigations. It then outlines the problem of closure as a concept, most particularly as an emotional expectation. There is a widely held view that the justice system can help provide closure for people who have suffered violent loss. Yet closure as a construct is amorphously defined: there is no agreement among researchers about what it is, whether it exists or, if it does exist, how it can be achieved. This article suggests that closure language should be avoided in the context of death investigations. Such language carries with it the counter-therapeutic potential to create unrealistic expectations regarding what inquests can accomplish, including through coroners’ findings and recommendations.
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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 | 0.150 | 0.225 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.172 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.022 | 0.047 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.031 |
| Research integrity | 0.015 | 0.028 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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; 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".