CHAPTER 5 
Conceptualization, Operationalization, and Measurement
Holographic Overview
The interrelated steps of conceptualization, operationalization, and measurement allow researchers to turn a general idea for a research topic into useful and valid measurements in the real world. An essential part of this process involves transforming the relatively vague terms of ordinary language into precise objects of ' I study with well-defined and measurable meanings.
Introduction Measuring Anything that Exists Conceptions, Concepts, and Reality Conceptions as Constructs
Conceptualization Indicators and Dimensions.The Interchangeability of Indicators.Real, Nominal. and Operational Definitions.Creating Conceptual Order. An Example of Conceptualization: The Concept 01' Anomie
Definitions in Descriptive and Explanatory Studies
Operationalization Choices Range OI Variation Variations between the Extremes A Note on Dimensions Defining Variables and Attributes
Levels of Measurement Single or Multiple Indicators Some Illustrations of operationalization Choices Operationalization Goes On and On
Criteria of Measurement Quality Precision and Accuracy Reliability Validity Who Decides What's Valid? Tension between Reliability and Validity
MAIN POINTS KEY TERMS
REVIEW QUESTIONS AND EXERCISES ADDITIONAL READINGS SOCIOLOGY WEB SITE INFOTRAC COLLEGE EDITION
Measuring Anything That Exists
Introduction This chapter and the next deal with how researchers move from a general idea about what they want to Sgttdy to effective and well-defined measurements in the rcal world/fltis chapter discusses the inter-related processes of conceptualization, operational-ization, and measurement. Chapter 6 bttilds on this foundation to discuss types of measttretnettts that are more complex.We begin this chapter by confronting the hid-den concern people sometimes have about whether it's truly possible to measure the stuff of lile: love,hate, prejudice, religiosity. radicalism, alienation.The answer is yes, but it will take a few pages to see how. Once We establish that researchers can mea-sure anything that exists, we'll turn to the steps in-volved in doing just that.
Measuring Anything Thai Exists Earlier itt this book, Isaid that one of the two pillars of science is observation. Because this word can suggest a casual, passive activity, scientists often use the term nteasurcmcnz instead, meaning careful, de-liberate observations of the real world for the pur-pose of describing objects and events in terms of the attributes composing a variable.You may have some reservations about the abil- ity of science to measure the really important as-pects of human social existence. ll you've read research reports dealing with something like liber-alism or religion or prejudice, you may have been dissatisfied with the way the researchers measured whatever they were studying. You may have felt that they were too superficial. that they missed the aspects that really matter most. Maybe they meas-ured religiosity as the number of times a person went to church, or maybe they measured liberalism by how people voted in a single election. Your dis- satisfaction would surely have increased it you had found yuursell being misclassified by the measure- . ment system.Your feeling of dissatisfaction reflects art impor-tant fact about social research: Most of the variablesWe want to study don't actually exist in the way that rocks exist. Indeed, they are made up. More-over, they seldom have a single, unanibiguous meaning.To see what lmean, suppose we want to study political party affiliation. To measure this variable,we might consult the list oi registered voters to note whether the people we were studying were registered as Democrats or Republicans and take that as a measure of their party affiliation. But we could also simply ask someone what party they identify with and take their response as our mea- sure. Notice that these two different ttteasurement possibilities reflect somewhat different definitions of "political party affiliation." They might even pro-duce different results: Someone tnay have regis- tered as Democrat years ago but gravitated more and more toward a Republican philosophy over time. Or someone who is registered with neither political party may, when asked, say she is affiliated with the one she feels the tn0>t kinship with. Sitnilar points apply to religious ajliliarion. Some-times this variable refers to official membership in a particular church; other times it simply means whatever religion, if any, you identify yourself With.Perhaps to you it means something else, such as church attendance. The truth is that neither "party affiliation" nor "religious affiliation" has any rmltncaning, if by "real" we mean corresponding to sortie objective aspect of reality. These variables do not exist in na-ture. They are merely terms we have made up and assigned specific meanings to for some purpose. such as doing social research.But, you might object, “political affiliation" and“religious affiliatiotuiand a host of other things social researchers are interested in, such as preju- dice or compassiot-t—have some reality. After all, we make statements about them, such as "In Happy- town, 55 percent of the adults affiliate with the Re-publican Party, and 45 percent of them are Episco-palians. Overall,people in Happytown are low in prejudice and high in compassion." Even ordinary people, notjust social researchers, have been known to make statements like that. if these things don't exist in reality, what is it that we're measuring and talking about? 
Chapter 5: Conceptualization,Opetattonalization,and Measurement
What indeed? Let's take a closer look by con- sidering a variable of interest to many social re— searchers (and many other people as well)— prejudice.
Canceptions, Concepts, and Reality As you and livandered down the road oi lile, we observed a lot of things and knew they were real through our observations, and we heard reports from other people that seemed real. For example: We personally heard people say nasty things about minotity groups. I We heard people said women were inferior I0 lTl("fl. 0 We read about African Americans being 5 lynched. O We read that women and minorities earned less tor the same work. u We learned about “ethnic cleansing" and wars in which one ethnic group tried to eradicate another. With additional experience, we noticed some-thing more. People who participated in lynching were also qttite likely to call Alrican Americans ugly names. A tot oi them, moreover, seemed to want women to "stay in their place." Eventually it dawned on us that these several tendencies otten appeared together in the same people and also had something in common. At some point, someone had a bright idea: “Let's use the word prejudiced as a shorthand notation for people like that. We can use the term even if they don't do all those things—as long as they're pretty much like that.” Being basically agreeable and interested in efficiency, we agreed to go along with the system That's where “prejudice” came from. We never ob- served it. We just agreed to use it as a shortcut. A name that represents a collection oi apparently re-lated phenomena that we've each observed in the course of life. In short, we made it up. Here‘s another clue that prejudice isn't some» thing that exists apart lrom our rough agreement to use the term in a certain way. Each oi us devel» ops our own mental image oi what the set oi tealphenomena we've observed represents in general and what these phenomena have itt common, When Isay the word pr2jttdt'1t:, it evokes a mental iniage in your mind, just as it evokes one in mine. It's as though lile drtjuers in our minds contained thousands oi sheets of paper, with each sheet oi paper labeled in the upper rightahand corner. A sheet ol paper in each ot our minds has the ternt prtf/‘tttt't't't* on it. On your sheet are all the things you've been told about prentdice and everything you've nlvserved that seetns to he an e.’ample oi it. My sheet has ivhat l‘ve been told about it plus all the things l’ve observed that seetn exatnples oi it and mine isn't the same as yours. The technical term [or those mental images, those sheets ol paper itt our mental tile tlratvers. Is cttttceptialt. That is, I have a conception of prejttdice, and so do you. We cat1't communicate these mental images directly, so we use the tertns written in the upper right—hantl corner of our own mental sheets of paper as a way otcommunicating about our con—ceptions and the things we observe that are related to those conceptions. These terms make it possible for us to communicate and eventually agree on what we will specifically mean by those terms. In social research, the process of coming to an agree~ tnent about what terms mean is cartceprttalizatiwt. and the result is called a cmtt-epti Let's take another example oi .1 conception.Suppose that t’m going to meet someone named Pat, whom you already know. l ask you What Pat is like. Now suppose that you have seen Pat help lost children find their parents and pttt a tiny bird back in its nest. Pat got you to take turkeys to poor fanii’ lies on Thanksgiving and to visit a children's hospi- tal on Christmas. You've seen Pat weep through a movie about a mother overcoming adversities to save and protect her child. As you search through your mental tiles, you may find all or most oi those phenomena recorded on a Single sheet labeled "compassionate." You look over the other entries on the page, and you find they seem to provide an accurate description oi Pat. So you say, “Pat is compassionate." Now I leal through my own mental file drawer until I find a sheet marked “cotnpassionate." I then 
Measuring Anything That Exists
look over the things written on my sheet, and I say.“Oh, that's nice." I now leel I know what Pat is like,but my expectations rellect the entries on my tile sheet, not yours. Later, when I meet Pat,
 
บทที่ 5 Conceptualization, Operationalization และประเมินเป็นภาพรวมขั้นตอนเกี่ยวข้อง conceptualization, operationalization และวัดอนุญาตให้นักวิจัยเพื่อเปิดความคิดทั่วไปสำหรับหัวข้อวิจัยเป็นวัดถูกต้อง และเป็นประโยชน์จริง เป็นส่วนสำคัญของกระบวนการนี้เกี่ยวข้องกับการเปลี่ยนภาษาปกติเงื่อนไขค่อนข้างคลุมเครือชัดเจนวัตถุ ' เรียนดี-defined และความหมายการวัดแนะนำที่วัดสิ่งที่มีอยู่ Conceptions แนวคิด และการ Conceptions จริงเป็นโครงสร้างตัวบ่งชี้ที่ conceptualization และ Interchangeability Dimensions.The ของ Indicators.Real, Nominal และปฏิบัติ Definitions.Creating สั่งแนวคิด ตัวอย่างของ Conceptualization: แนวคิด 01' AnomieDefinitions ในการศึกษาอธิบาย และอธิบายรูปแบบเปลี่ยนแปลงอ้อย operationalization เลือกช่วงระหว่างเหตุสุดขั้ว A กำหนดตัวแปรและแอททริบิวต์มิติระดับของการวัดเดียวหรือหลายตัวบ่งชี้บางภาพประกอบของ operationalization Operationalization เลือกไปบน และบนเกณฑ์การประเมินคุณภาพความแม่นยำและความถูกต้องความน่าเชื่อถือตั้งแต่ที่ตัดสินใจที่ถูกต้องคืออะไร ความตึงเครียดระหว่างความน่าเชื่อถือและมีผลบังคับใช้จุดหลักสำคัญเงื่อนไขทบทวนคำถามและแบบฝึกหัดเพิ่มเติมอ่านสังคมวิทยาเว็บไซต์ INFOTRAC วิทยาลัยรุ่นวัดสิ่งที่มีอยู่แนะนำบทนี้และต่อไปเรื่องวิธีวิจัยไปจากความคิดทั่วไปเกี่ยวกับสิ่งที่พวกเขาต้อง Sgttdy การประเมินผล และกำหนดไว้อย่างดีในบท โลก/fltis rcal กล่าวถึงกระบวนการที่เกี่ยวข้องระหว่าง conceptualization งาน ization และประเมิน Bttilds บทที่ 6 เกี่ยวกับมูลนิธินี้เพื่อหารือเกี่ยวกับชนิดของ measttretnettts ที่มีความซับซ้อนมาก เราเริ่มบทนี้ โดยเผชิญปัญหาเดนซ่อน คนบางครั้งมีว่ามันเป็นอย่างแท้จริงสามารถวัดสิ่งของ lile: ความรัก เกลียด อคติ ความเคร่งศาสนา radicalism จำหน่าย คำตอบคือ ใช่ แต่จะใช้กี่หน้าเพื่อดูวิธีการ เมื่อเราสร้างที่นักวิจัยสามารถ mea แน่ใจสิ่งที่มีอยู่ เราจะเปิดไปขั้นตอนใน-volved ในการทำเพียงMeasuring Anything Thai Exists Earlier itt this book, Isaid that one of the two pillars of science is observation. Because this word can suggest a casual, passive activity, scientists often use the term nteasurcmcnz instead, meaning careful, de-liberate observations of the real world for the pur-pose of describing objects and events in terms of the attributes composing a variable.You may have some reservations about the abil- ity of science to measure the really important as-pects of human social existence. ll you've read research reports dealing with something like liber-alism or religion or prejudice, you may have been dissatisfied with the way the researchers measured whatever they were studying. You may have felt that they were too superficial. that they missed the aspects that really matter most. Maybe they meas-ured religiosity as the number of times a person went to church, or maybe they measured liberalism by how people voted in a single election. Your dis- satisfaction would surely have increased it you had found yuursell being misclassified by the measure- . ment system.Your feeling of dissatisfaction reflects art impor-tant fact about social research: Most of the variablesWe want to study don't actually exist in the way that rocks exist. Indeed, they are made up. More-over, they seldom have a single, unanibiguous meaning.To see what lmean, suppose we want to study political party affiliation. To measure this variable,we might consult the list oi registered voters to note whether the people we were studying were registered as Democrats or Republicans and take that as a measure of their party affiliation. But we could also simply ask someone what party they identify with and take their response as our mea- sure. Notice that these two different ttteasurement possibilities reflect somewhat different definitions of "political party affiliation." They might even pro-duce different results: Someone tnay have regis- tered as Democrat years ago but gravitated more and more toward a Republican philosophy over time. Or someone who is registered with neither political party may, when asked, say she is affiliated with the one she feels the tn0>t kinship with. Sitnilar points apply to religious ajliliarion. Some-times this variable refers to official membership in a particular church; other times it simply means whatever religion, if any, you identify yourself With.Perhaps to you it means something else, such as church attendance. The truth is that neither "party affiliation" nor "religious affiliation" has any rmltncaning, if by "real" we mean corresponding to sortie objective aspect of reality. These variables do not exist in na-ture. They are merely terms we have made up and assigned specific meanings to for some purpose. such as doing social research.But, you might object, “political affiliation" and“religious affiliatiotuiand a host of other things social researchers are interested in, such as preju- dice or compassiot-t—have some reality. After all, we make statements about them, such as "In Happy- town, 55 percent of the adults affiliate with the Re-publican Party, and 45 percent of them are Episco-palians. Overall,people in Happytown are low in prejudice and high in compassion." Even ordinary people, notjust social researchers, have been known to make statements like that. if these things don't exist in reality, what is it that we're measuring and talking about? บทที่ 5: Conceptualization, Opetattonalization และประเมินสิ่งที่แน่นอน ลองหลบ โดยคอน sidering แปรที่น่าสนใจในหลายสังคม re — ผู้ (และคนอื่น ๆ ด้วย) ซึ่งอคติCanceptions, Concepts, and Reality As you and livandered down the road oi lile, we observed a lot of things and knew they were real through our observations, and we heard reports from other people that seemed real. For example: We personally heard people say nasty things about minotity groups. I We heard people said women were inferior I0 lTl("fl. 0 We read about African Americans being 5 lynched. O We read that women and minorities earned less tor the same work. u We learned about “ethnic cleansing" and wars in which one ethnic group tried to eradicate another. With additional experience, we noticed some-thing more. People who participated in lynching were also qttite likely to call Alrican Americans ugly names. A tot oi them, moreover, seemed to want women to "stay in their place." Eventually it dawned on us that these several tendencies otten appeared together in the same people and also had something in common. At some point, someone had a bright idea: “Let's use the word prejudiced as a shorthand notation for people like that. We can use the term even if they don't do all those things—as long as they're pretty much like that.” Being basically agreeable and interested in efficiency, we agreed to go along with the system That's where “prejudice” came from. We never ob- served it. We just agreed to use it as a shortcut. A name that represents a collection oi apparently re-lated phenomena that we've each observed in the course of life. In short, we made it up. Here‘s another clue that prejudice isn't some» thing that exists apart lrom our rough agreement to use the term in a certain way. Each oi us devel» ops our own mental image oi what the set oi tealphenomena we've observed represents in general and what these phenomena have itt common, When Isay the word pr2jttdt'1t:, it evokes a mental iniage in your mind, just as it evokes one in mine. It's as though lile drtjuers in our minds contained thousands oi sheets of paper, with each sheet oi paper labeled in the upper rightahand corner. A sheet ol paper in each ot our minds has the ternt prtf/‘tttt't't't* on it. On your sheet are all the things you've been told about prentdice and everything you've nlvserved that seetns to he an e.’ample oi it. My sheet has ivhat l‘ve been told about it plus all the things l’ve observed that seetn exatnples oi it and mine isn't the same as yours. The technical term [or those mental images, those sheets ol paper itt our mental tile tlratvers. Is cttttceptialt. That is, I have a conception of prejttdice, and so do you. We cat1't communicate these mental images directly, so we use the tertns written in the upper right—hantl corner of our own mental sheets of paper as a way otcommunicating about our con—ceptions and the things we observe that are related to those conceptions. These terms make it possible for us to communicate and eventually agree on what we will specifically mean by those terms. In social research, the process of coming to an agree~ tnent about what terms mean is cartceprttalizatiwt. and the result is called a cmtt-epti Let's take another example oi .1 conception.Suppose that t’m going to meet someone named Pat, whom you already know. l ask you What Pat is like. Now suppose that you have seen Pat help lost children find their parents and pttt a tiny bird back in its nest. Pat got you to take turkeys to poor fanii’ lies on Thanksgiving and to visit a children's hospi- tal on Christmas. You've seen Pat weep through a movie about a mother overcoming adversities to save and protect her child. As you search through your mental tiles, you may find all or most oi those phenomena recorded on a Single sheet labeled "compassionate." You look over the other entries on the page, and you find they seem to provide an accurate description oi Pat. So you say, “Pat is compassionate." Now I leal through my own mental file drawer until I find a sheet marked “cotnpassionate." I then วัดสิ่งที่มีอยู่มองเห็นสิ่งที่เขียนบนแผ่นงานของฉัน และฉันพูด" โอ้ ที่ได้ดี" ฉันตอนนี้ leel ฉันรู้ว่า Pat คืออะไรชอบ แต่ rellect ความคาดหวังของฉันรายการบนแผ่นงานกระเบื้องของฉัน คุณไม่ ต่อ เมื่อฉันพบแพท
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