Please enable JavaScript.
Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.
Measurement of Constructs (**Levels of Measurement also called rating…
Measurement of Constructs
Conceptualization
is the mental process by which fuzzy and imprecise constructs (concepts) and their constituent components are defined in concrete and precise terms. For instance the word "prejudice". The process of understanding what is included and what is excluded in the concept of prejudice is the conceptualization process.
Unidimensional constructs; expected to have a single underlying dimension. Example: a person's weight, wind speed
Multidimensional constructs; consist of two or more underlying dimensions. Example: a person's academic aptitude
Operationalization refers to the process of developing indicators or items for measuring these constructs.
**Levels of Measurement
also called rating scales refer to the values that an indicator can take but says nothing about the indicator itself. Example: male and female (or M and F, 1 and 2) are two levels of the indicator "gender".
Nominal scales also called categorical scales, measure categorical data. These scales are used for variables or indicators that have mutually exclusive attributes. Examples include gender, industry types, and religious affiliation
Ordinal scales are those that measure rank-ordered data, such as the ranking of students in a class as first, second, third, and so forth, based on their grade point average or test scores.
Interval scales are those where the values measured are not only rank-ordered, but are also equidistant from adjacent attributes. For example, the temperature scale where the difference between 30 and 40 and 80 and 90 degrees Fahrenheit are the same.
Ratio scales are those that have all the qualities of nominal, ordinal, and interval scales, and in addition also have a "true zero" point (where the value zero implies lack or non-availability of the underlying construct).
Binary scales
are nominal scales consisting of binary items that assume one of two possible values such as yes or no, true of false, and so on.
Guttman scale
uses a series of items arranged in increasing order of intensity of the construct of interest from least intense to most intense.
Likert scale
, very popular rating scale for measuring ordinal data. Scales includes simply-worded statements to which respondents can indicate their extent of agreement or disagreement on a five or seven-point scale ranging from "strongly disagree" to "strongly agree".
Semantic differential scale
is a composite scale where respondents are asked to indicate their opinions or feelings toward a single-statement using different pairs of adjectives framed as polar opposites.
Scaling
is the process of creating the indicators. A branch of measurement that involves the construction of measures by associating qualitative judgments about unobservable constructs with quantitative, measurable metric units.
Thurstone's equal-appearing scaling method
Likert's summative scaling method
Guttman's cumulative scaling method
Indexes
is a composite score derived from aggregating measure of multiple constructs (called components) using a set of rules and formulas. Example: Consumer price index which is computed every month by the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor
Another example of index is socio-economic status (SES). This index is a combination of three constructs: income, education, and occupation. These very different measures are combined to create an overall SES index score, using a weighted combination
Indexes often comprise of components that are very different from each other. Second, indexes often combine objectively measurable values such as prices or income.
Typologies
are multi-dimensional but include only nominal variables. For instance, one can create a political typology of newspapers based on their orientation toward domestic and foreign policy.