Conceptualization choices are ultimately governed by their usefulness in causal theories.

Evidence

The ontological view of concepts makes sense of how many qualitative scholars think about social and political phenomena. For example, Wendt (1998) has argued for this kind of relationship: “Constitutive theories have a different objective, which is to account for the properties of things by reference to the structures in virtue of which they exist.” I suggest that this is less mysterious than it usually sounds in the social constructivist literature. Part of the problem is that we have simultaneously an ontological theory of the phenomenon and we choose the secondary-level dimensions in part because of their causal powers at the basic level. There is no escaping this duality, since a good conceptualization is in the final analysis in large part determined by its usefulness in basic-level causal theories. — Gary Goertz, Social Science Concepts, 430

Categorization

• XREF: Speaks directly to the standing directive that good curated claims should be causal and mechanism-oriented rather than summaries — here the mechanism is selection of dimensions by basic-level causal payoff.