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Measurement of Constructs - Coggle Diagram
Measurement of Constructs
Conceptualization
is the mental process by which fuzzy and imprecise constructs and their constituent components are defined in concrete and precise terms.
One important decision in conceptualizing constructs is specifying whether they are unidimensional and multidimensional.
Unidimensional constructs are those that are expected
to have a single underlying dimension. These constructs can be measured using a single measure or tes
Multidimensional constructs consist of two or more underlying dimensions.For instance, if we conceptualize a person’s academic aptitude as consisting of two dimensions
Conceptualization is a process is all the more important because of the imprecision, vagueness, and ambiguity of many social science constructs
Indexes and Typologies
When researchers sometimes wish to summarize measures of two or more constructs to create a set of categories or types called a typology
Unlike scales or indexes, typologies are multidimensional but include only nominal variables.
One can create a political typology of newspapers based on their orientation toward domestic and foreign policy, as expressed in their editorial columns,
An
index
is a composite score derived from aggregating measures of multiple constructs (called components) using a set of rules and formulas.
It is different from scales in that scales also aggregate measures, but these measures measure different dimensions or the same
dimension of a single construct.
A well-known example of an index is the consumer price index
Levels of Measurement also called rating scales, refer to the values that an indicator can take
Four Common rating scales
Likert scale
is used for for measuring ordinal data in social science research.
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.
Binary scales
are nominal scales consisting of binary items that assume one of two possible values, such as yes or no, true or 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.
Four generic types of rating scales
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
Interval scales
are those where the values measured are not only rank-ordered, but are also equidistant from adjacent attributes
Nominal scales
, also called categorical scales, measure categorical data.
atio scales are those that have all the qualities of nominal, ordinal, and interval scales, and in addition, also have a “true zero” point
Operationalization
Operationalization refers to the process of developing indicators or items for measuring
these constructs.
each indicator may have several attributes (or levels) and
each attribute represent a
value
.
A
reflective indicator
is a measure that
“reflects” an underlying construct.
The combination of indicators at the empirical level
representing a given construct is called a
variable
.
A
formative indicator
is a measure that “forms” or contributes to an underlying construct.
Scaling
is a branch of measurement that involves the construction of measures by associating qualitative judgments about unobservable constructs with quantitative, measurable metric units.
The outcome of a scaling process is a
scale
, which is an empirical structure for measuring items or indicators of a given construct.
Thurstone’s equal-appearing scaling method
is a method of equal-appearing intervals. This method starts with a clear conceptual definition of the construct of interest.
Likert’s summative scaling method
starts with a clear definition of the construct of interest, and using a set of experts to generate about 80 to 100 potential scale items.
Guttman’s cumulative scaling method
is based on social distance technique, which assumes that people’s willingness to participate in social relations with other people vary in degrees of intensity, and measures that intensity using a list of items arranged from “least intense” to “most intense”.