CRIM 220 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Operationalization, Mental Process, Criminal Record
14 May 2018
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Monday, January 29, 2018
Research Methods – Lecture Notes
o Week 4: Concepts, Operationalization, and Measurement
o Conceptualization → Operationalization → Measurement
o Conceptualization:
o Mental process of making fuzzy and imprecise notions more precise.
o Not necessarily unidimensional:
▪ Indicators and dimensions are aspects or characteristics of a concept.
o Operationalization:
o Process of developing working definitions that describe how measurements will be made.
o How will the concept be observed or measured?
o Identify variables.
o Measurement:
o Making observations and assigning values to those observations.
o Essentially, it’s going out into the field and observing.
o Exhaustive: Every observation fits into a category.
o Mutually exclusive: Each observation is in only one category.
o Levels of Measurement
o (1) Normal Measures:
o Named categories with no clear organization or hierarchy.
o Sex
o Race
o Marital status
o Crime type
o Variables with no/yes responses
o (2) Ordinal Measures:
o Variables with attributes that can be rank-ordered, but no clear numerical distinction.
o Grades (A-F)
o Likert-type scale responses (strongly disagree-strongly agree)
o Sizes (small, medium, large)
o (3) Interval Measures:
o Ordered categories with equal distance between values and arbitrary zero point.
o Temperature (C/F)
o IQ
o Offender assessments
o (4) Ratio Measures:
o Ordered categories with equal distance and a meaningful zero point.
o Zero represents absence.
o Temperature (K)
o Age
o Time spent in prison
o # of arrests
o “What’s My Level of Measurement?” worksheet on canvas *.
o Measuring Crime
o Decisions based on:
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Research methods lecture notes: week 4: concepts, operationalization, and measurement, conceptualization operationalization measurement, conceptualization, mental process of making fuzzy and imprecise notions more precise, not necessarily unidimensional: The montreal longitudinal study and the adams survey (in portland): are respondents truthful? (in the adams survey they collected urine samples to make sure the participants were being honest), general considerations, for any dataset, consider potential limitations, generalizability. Monday, january 29, 2018: omissions, reliability and validity of measures, reliability, consistency; obtaining the same results when measuring something more than once, issues, changes in procedures. Interviewer effects: response variation, telescoping (incorrectly lump an event into the wrong time-period, solutions, test-retest method. Monday, january 29, 2018: conceptualization, operationalization, and measurement examples, many us states have recently banned the box on employment applications. That is, employers cannot ask applicants to indicate whether they have been convicted of felonies.
