The Practice Of Social Research - Ch5 - Vocab

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conceptualization

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(1) The mental process whereby fuzzy and imprecise notions (concepts) are made more specific and precise. So you want to study prejudice. What do you mean by "prejudice"? Are there different kinds of prejudice? What are they? (2) Sexual reproduction among intellectuals.

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construct validity

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The degree to which a measure relates to other variables as expected within a system of theoretical relationships.

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content validity

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The degree to which a measure covers the range of meanings included within a concept.

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criterion-related validity

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The degree to which a measure relates to some external criterion. For example, the validity of College Board tests is shown in their ability to predict the college success of students. Also called predictive validity.

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dimension

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A specifiable aspect of a concept. "Religiosity," for example, might be specified in terms of a belief dimension, a ritual dimension, a devotional dimension, a knowledge dimension, and so forth.

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face validity

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(1) That quality of an indicator that makes it seem a reasonable measure of some variable. That the frequency of attendance at religious services is some indication of a person's religiosity seems to make sense without a lot of explanation. It has face validity. (2) When your face looks like your driver's license photo (rare and perhaps unfortunate).

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indicator

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An observation that we choose to consider as a reflection of a variable we wish to study. Thus, for example, attending religious services might be considered an indicator of religiosity.

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interval measure

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A level of measurement describing a variable whose attributes are rank-ordered and have equal distances between adjacent attributes. The Fahrenheit temperature scale is an example of this, because the distance between 17 and 18 is the same as that between 89 and 90. See also nominal measure, ordinal measure, and ratio measure.

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nominal measure

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A variable whose attributes have only the characteristics of exhaustiveness and mutual exclusiveness. In other words, a level of measurement describing a variable that has attributes that are merely different, as distinguished from ordinal, interval, or ratio measures. Gender is an example of a nominal measure.

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ordinal measure

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A level of measurement describing a variable with attributes we can rank-order along some dimension. An example is socioeconomic status as composed of the attributes high, medium, low. See also interval measure, nominal measure, and ratio measure.

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predictive validity

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see criterion-related validity

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ratio measure

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A level of measurement describing a variable with attributes that have all the qualities of nominal, ordinal, and interval measures and in addition are based on a "true zero" point. Age is an example of a ratio measure. See also nominal measure, interval measure, and ordinal measure.

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reliability

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(1) That quality of measurement method that suggests that the same data would have been collected each time in repeated observations of the same phenomenon. In the context of a survey, we would expect that the question "Did you attend religious services last week?" would have higher reliability than the question "About how many times have you attended religious services in your life?" This is not to be confused with validity. (2) Quality of repeatability in untruths.

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specification

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(1) The process through which concepts are made more specific.

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validity

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A term describing a measure that accurately reflects the concept it is intended to measure. For example, your IQ would seem a more valid measure of your intelligence than the number of hours you spend in the library would. Though the ultimate validity of a measure can never be proved, we may agree to its relative validity on the basis of face validity, criterion-related validity, construct validity, content validity, internal validation, and external validation. Validity must not be confused with reliability.

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direct observables

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those
things we can observe rather simply and directly,
like the color of an apple or the check mark on a
questionnaire.

Babbie, Earl R. (2012-01-01). The Practice of Social Research (Page 127). Cengage Learning. Kindle Edition.

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indirect observables

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indirect observables,
require "relatively more subtle, complex, or indirect observations" (1964: 55). We note a person's
check mark beside "female" in a questionnaire and
have indirectly observed that person's sex.

History books or minutes of corporate board meetings provide indirect observations of past social actions.

Babbie, Earl R. (2012-01-01). The Practice of Social Research (Page 127). Cengage Learning. Kindle Edition.

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constructs

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constructs—theoretical creations that are based on
observations but that cannot be observed directly
or indirectly. A good example is intelligence quotient, or IQ. It is constructed mathematically from
observations of the answers given to a large number of questions on an IQ test. No one can directly
or indirectly observe IQ.

Babbie, Earl R. (2012-01-01). The Practice of Social Research (Page 128). Cengage Learning. Kindle Edition.

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concept

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Kaplan (1964: 49) defines concept as a "family
of conceptions." A concept is, as Kaplan notes, a
construct, something we create. Concepts such as
compassion and prejudice are constructs created
from your conception of them, my conception of
them, and the conceptions of all those who have
ever used these terms. They cannot be observed
directly or indirectly, because they don't exist. We
made them up.

Babbie, Earl R. (2012-01-01). The Practice of Social Research (Page 128). Cengage Learning. Kindle Edition.

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conceptualization

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The process through which we specify what
we mean when we use particular terms in research
is called conceptualization.

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Suppose we want to
find out, for example, whether women are more
compassionate than men. I suspect many people
assume this is the case, but it might be interesting to find out if it's really so. We can't meaningfully study the question, let alone agree on the
answer, without some working agreements about
the meaning of compassion. They are "working"
agreements in the sense that they allow us to work
on the question. We don't need to agree or even
pretend to agree that a particular specification is
ultimately the best one.
Conceptualization, then, produces a specific,
agreed-on meaning for a concept for the purposes
of research. This process of specifying exact meaning involves describing the indicators we'll be using
to measure our concept and the different aspects of
the concept, called dimensions.

Babbie, Earl R. (2012-01-01). The Practice of Social Research (Page 129). Cengage Learning. Kindle Edition.

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interchangeability of indicators

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The interchangeability of indicators means that
if several different indicators all represent, to some
degree, the same concept, then all of them will behave the same way that the concept would behave
if it were real and could be observed.

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Surprisingly, we can still reach an agreement on whether
men or women are the more compassionate. How
we do that has to do with the interchangeability of
indicators.
The logic works like this. If we disagree totally
on the value of the indicators, one solution would
be to study all of them. Suppose that women turn
out to be more compassionate than men on all 100
indicators—on all the indicators you favor and on
all of mine. Then we would be able to agree that
women are more compassionate than men, even
though we still disagree on exactly what compassion means in general.
The interchangeability of indicators means that
if several different indicators all represent, to some
degree, the same concept, then all of them will behave the same way that the concept would behave
if it were real and could be observed. Thus, given
a basic agreement about what "compassion" is, if
women are generally more compassionate than
men, we should be able to observe that difference
by using any reasonable measure of compassion. If,
on the other hand, women are more compassionate than men on some indicators but not on others,
we should see if the two sets of indicators represent
different dimensions of compassion.

Babbie, Earl R. (2012-01-01). The Practice of Social Research (Page 132). Cengage Learning. Kindle Edition.

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specification

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The specification of concepts in scientific inquiry depends instead on nominal and operational
definitions. A nominal definition is one that is
simply assigned to a term without any claim that
the definition represents a "real" entity. Nominal
definitions are arbitrary—I could define compassion as "plucking feathers off helpless birds" if I
wanted to—but they can be more or less useful.
For most purposes, especially communication, that
last definition of compassion would be pretty useless. Most nominal definitions represent some consensus, or convention, about how a particular term
is to be used.

Babbie, Earl R. (2012-01-01). The Practice of Social Research (Page 132). Cengage Learning. Kindle Edition.

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progression of measurement

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Measurement steps (Example: Social Class)

1. Conceptualization
What are the different meanings and dimensions of the concept "social class"?

2. Nominal definition
For our study, we will define "social class" as representing economic diff erences: specifically, income.

3. Operational definition
We will measure economic diff erences via responses to the survey question "What was your
annual income, before taxes, last year?"

4. Measurements in the real world
The interviewer will ask, "What was your annual income, before taxes, last year?"

Babbie, Earl R. (2012-01-01). The Practice of Social Research (Page 134). Cengage Learning. Kindle Edition.