Psychometric Comparison of Meaning (PCOM)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Meaning-in-life is valued across numerous scholarly disciplines and diverse cultures. However, the nature and structure of meaning remain unclear. A tripartite structure of meaning – Coherence, Purpose, and Significance – has recently garnered theoretical and empirical support, but comparisons with alternative structures have been limited. To gain psychometric clarity on the structure of meaning, we conducted four sets of analyses in a large (N = 1913) sample of undergraduate students: 1) a confirmatory factor analysis to evaluate the validity of the tripartite structure, 2) exploratory factor analyses to evaluate possible alternative structures, 3) additional confirmatory factor analyses to evaluate the validity of promising alternative structures, and 4) comparisons of zero-order and partial correlations between the factors in these meaning structures and important life outcomes. We found moderately strong support for the tripartite structure of meaning and mixed support for two alternative structures. Notably, across structures, only Significance maintained unique associations with suicidal desire.
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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 | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.004 |
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".