User:Dpratchler/Causation (sociology)/Kennedy303 Peer Review

General info

 * Whose work are you reviewing?

Devin


 * Link to draft you're reviewing
 * Sandbox draft
 * Link to the current version of the article (if it exists)
 * Causation (sociology)

Lead
The Lead reflects most of the content in the article but does not mention a few of the topics covered in the article body.

The introductory sentence is clear and concise when describing the article’s topic.

The Lead does not provide a brief description of each major section. It is missing descriptions of “Sufficient and necessary causes” and “A functionalist theory of causation.”

The lead does include some information that is not present in the article. It mentions three theories that hold varying definitions of causality, but the main article only discusses functionalist. It might be good include a section for counterfactual and probabilistic theoretical conceptualizations of causality or remove them from the lead section.

The lead section is concise and is not overburdened with detail.

Content
Most of the content is relevant to the topic. I was unsure if the section “Elective Affinity” is relevant to the discussion of causation. It might be helpful for readers unfamiliar with the topic to provide a brief explanation for the relationship between causation and elective affinity. I think a more explicit statement to connect between the two would be useful to motivate the inclusion of this section in the article.

The content added is up to date. The article could be strengthened by including how a few more theoretical traditions define causality, if there is time. I understand that we are limited in what we can add to the articles in the time we have!

The article does not deal with one of Wikipedia’s equity gaps, and does not address topics related to historically underrepresented populations or topics.

Tone and Balance
The content added is neutral and does not seem to demonstrate heavy bias towards a particular position.

There are a few places where changing a word might improve neutrality.


 * In section "Sufficient and necessary causes" you say "Talcott Parsons asserted that such an interpretation of Weber's thoughts were reductive and misdirect from Weber's assertions", and I think changing asserted to a more neutral word like claimed or argued would be beneficial
 * In section "Causation and social research" you say "In contrast, ethnographical methods and surveys, which maximize the qualitative richness of the data, lack the statistical generalizability that experimental studies produce." I think changing the phrase "qualitative richness" to a more neutral statement would strengthen the section

Weber’s conceptualizations of and ideas around causation are highly represented, and other theorists are represented to a lesser extent. I am not sure if this constitues over/under representation, or if Weber simply provided the most well-rounded explanations about causation. As I stated earlier, I think the article could be strengthened by adding in a few more theories, and their conceptualizations of causation.


 * One concept that might be beneficial to include would be “self-fulfilling prophesy,” which I discuss in the article I am updating and expanding. Robert K. Merton discussed how labeling causes a change in behavior. This might strengthen the article’s review of causation by providing another viewpoint, and one that is used in contemporary studies.
 * In the lead section, counterfactual and probabilistic theories are mentioned, it might be good to include them in the article body.

The content does not attempt to persuade the reader in favor of one position, or away from another.

Sources and References
Most content was backed up by reliable secondary sources. A few claims need citations:


 * "Social structures serve the function of establishing, propagating, and enforcing both cultural and legal norms and, as such, play an indispensable role in constituting and maintaining social order; for these standards to be effective, however, they must be applied universally and in a predictable manner."
 * "Through punishment, standards are then visibly reaffirmed throughout the general populace."
 * "Experimental methods, which maximize statistical rigor, are often difficult to conduct as they are expensive and can be detached from the social processes that researchers seek to undertake."
 * "In contrast, ethnographical methods and surveys, which maximize the qualitative richness of the data, lack the statistical generalizability that experimental studies produce."
 * As such, causality deduced from social research can be relatively abstract (findings from an ethnography) or exact (statistical research, laboratory studies)."

The content does seem to accurately reflect what the sources say.

The sources are fairly thorough for the information provided in the article.

The article does not include the perspectives of every sociological theory, but it does reflect the available literature on the selected topics.

The sources are from a variety of dates, which provides valuable context for the development of conceptualizations of causation. This is useful to provide historical progression, especially because sociological theories are all built on preceding traditions, very rarely do they exist without context and interaction with older theories.

The sources do have some diversity in them and are not all by historically privileged individuals.

All the sources are reliable and come from peer-reviewed journals or are published books.

All the links I checked work, none were broken.

I would recommend going back and making sure the journal articles include the DOI if possible and other potentially missing information. I noticed that when I was adding my own sources the automatic option did not have all fields, and Wikipedia has asked us to include DOI’s when possible for journal articles.

Organization
The content is very well written, it is clear that Devin is familiar with this topic. My main suggestion for composition is simplifying some of the grammar and the concepts. For the general audience, some sections may benefit from a bit more context and explanation. There were a few places in the article with unclear grammar that could be strengthened by simplifying some of the sentences and moving clauses to pair the subject of the sentence with the verb.

I think the content is broken down into sections that reflect the main points of the topic.

I would suggest moving the last two sections to the top of the article, as they provide the clearest definitions of causality, and might help situate readers as they go through the rest of the article. I think the last two sections provide a good amount of context for navigating the more theoretical discussions of causality.

Overall, I find the organization of the article to be strong.

Images and Media
The article does include images, and I feel like they do visually show causation. I thought the axe and the fallen tree was a fantastic visual demonstration of causation. My only thought was that the axe is shown first which implies being the cause of the next picture, but the fallen tree in the next picture has been chewed by beavers. The caption of the second photo does mention axe versus beavers, but I feel like this point would be strengthened by explicitly discussing the example in the article body. It’s a perfect demonstration of the point Devin already made about ensuring the two variables are related in a causal manner, and do not have a spurious relationship. I think a few short sentences can tie these images in really well.

The images are captioned but I think they need updating to accurately reflect the content of the pictures. The second caption does not reflect the actual image and would not be helpful for someone accessing the page with a screen reader.

The images adhere to Wikipedia’s copyright regulations.

I think the images are laid out in a visually appealing way, and they do not detract from the text of the article.

Overall Impressions
Unfortunately, I am unable to find the version of the article prior to Devin’s upload of his draft, but I do know that he removed several instances of direct plagiarism, as well as added several citations. Removing plagiarism is always necessary and is a large improvement to the article. The overall quality of the article has been improved.

Some of the strengths of the article include a clear demonstration of familiarity with the content, removal of plagiarism and added citations, and reworking of the lead sentence to provide better clarity.

The final two sections of the article were also incredibly strong and give a very clear picture to readers about the nature of causation.

I think the article is very strong overall, I was very impressed by the level of knowledge demonstrated in the article.

I think my suggestions for improving the article would be reworking some of the sentences to remove passive language, simplifying some of the grammar, and rewording some of the sections so that they would be more easily understandable by the general reader. The concepts were clearly communicated, but the article could be strengthened by providing further explanation for the more complicated subjects.

Passive language:


 * In "A functionalist theory of causation" you wrote "Through punishment, standards are then visibly reaffirmed throughout the general populace." Maybe try "Under functionalist theory, punishment is seen to affirm standards in the eyes of the general populace."
 * In "Elective affinity" you wrote "The concept of elective affinity was used by Max Weber to describe the relationship between capitalism and the protestant ethic and differs from a purely deterministic account of individual behavior." Maybe change the start of the sentence to "Max Weber uses the concept of elective affinity to describe..."
 * In "Causation and social research" you wrote "As such, care must always be taken when attributing or describing causal relationships from the findings of social research, as this will vary based on methodology and, consequently, the nature of the data." I was a bit confused about the meaning of this sentence, and what you were trying to say. It might be helpful to consider who the actor is. Who should the care be taken by? You might want to consider switching up the wording to something that has a clear subject. Did you mean something like "The nature of data and methodologies used to collect it may influence findings of social research, and these factors can make it difficult for researchers to accurately attribute causal relationships."

Simplifying grammar:


 * First sentence of "Sufficient and necessary causes" might be stronger as "Within sociology, causation has been..." or "There is a long history of epistemological debates surrounding causality in sociology, particularly regarding external validity of research." Consider breaking up the first sentence into two, they may not be related strongly enough to warrant a semicolon
 * Second sentence of "Sufficient and necessary causes" could use some clarification, try "In The Protestant Work Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber attributed..."
 * Third sentence of "Sufficient and necessary causes" is a bit confusing, perhaps try "A central criticism of Weber's study claimed that he did not account for material and geographical variables, which were shown to affect the proliferation of puritan beliefs."
 * In "Sufficient and necessary causes" you say "To this end, Weber identified two types of causation" Removing "To this end" would make the sentence stronger.
 * First sentence of "A functionalist theory of causation" would be better as two sentences. I suggest a split after "Functionalist and Newtonian thought" for clarity.
 * In "A functionalist theory of causation" you write "Social structures serve the function of establishing, propagating, and enforcing both cultural and legal norms and, as such, play an indispensable role in constituting and maintaining social order; for these standards to be effective, however, they must be applied universally and in a predictable manner." I think this passage could use some reworking. The first part would be stronger as "Social structures establish, propagate, and enforce both cultural and legal norms, and therefore work to create and maintain social order. For these standards to be effective, they must be applied both universally and predictably." This splits the section into two pieces, and strengthens the roles of social structures by removing some extra words
 * In "Elective affinity" you write "As such, elective affinity serves to incorporate..." Stronger language might be Elective affinity incorporates..."

One other small recommendation I have is to change the formatting of the “references” subsection into a section.

I mentioned this earlier, but I think it might be a good idea to consider moving the final two sections to the beginning of the article, as they provide some valuable context for the reader that would aid in comprehension of the other sections.

Overall, I was very impressed. I think Devin has presented a strong article draft, and I am looking forward to the finished product.

Please do not hesitate to reach out if you have any questions about my feedback, I would be happy to talk about your article!