| Term | Definition |
|---|
| Paradigms | A model that provides framework for interpreting observations. |
| Operational definition | The concrete and specific definition of something in terms of the operations by which observations are to be categorized. The operational definition of "earning an A in this course" might be "correctly answering at least 90 percent of the final exam questions." |
| operationalization | 1) One step beyond conceptualization. Operationalization is the process of developing operational definitions, or specifying the exact operations involved in measuring a variable. |
| conceptualization | (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? See also conceptualization's pal, operationalization. (2) Sexual reproduction among intellectuals. |
| content validity | which a measure covers the range of meanings included within a concept. |
| criterion-related validity | The degree to which a measure relates to some external criterion. For example, the validity of the College Board exams is shown in their ability to predict the college success of students. Also called predictive validity. |
| face validity | (1) That quality of an indicator that makes it seem a reasonable measure of some variable. That the frequency of church attendance 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). |
| ordinal measure | A level of measurement describing a variable with attributes we can rank-order along some dimension. An example would be socioeconomic status as composed of the attributes high, medium, low. See and nominal measure, interval measure, and ratio measure. |
| ratio measure | 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 interval measure, nominal measure, and ordinal measure. |
| reliability | quality of measurement method that suggests that the same data would have been collected each time in (Page 487) repeated observations of the same phenomenon. In the context of a survey, we would expect that the question "Did you attend church last week?" would have higher reliability than the question "About how many times have you attended church in your life?" This is not to be confused with validity. (2) Quality of repeatability in untruths. |
| validity | 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 would the number of hours you spend in the library. Though the ultimate validity of a measure can never be proven, 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. This must not be confused with reliability. |
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