The Methodological Challenges of Measuring the Duration of Strikes: Insights From Canada 1960–2024
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT This article examines the methodological challenges involved with measuring the duration of strikes. On the one hand, several studies opt to calculate the average ‘duration’ of stoppages by dividing the number of working days lost by the maximum number of employees involved in work stoppages. On the other hand, many other studies use an average measure of the duration of strikes calculated by either using the arithmetic mean or median number of strike days taken across all strikes in a given period. While both measures have their use, they fundamentally measure different things. This article aims to theoretically explain the important difference between these two measures of strike duration, before presenting empirical arguments in favour of studying these measures of duration separately (primarily drawing on official strike data from Canada, 1960–2024).
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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 | 0.008 | 0.029 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.020 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".