SOC SCI H1E Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Operationalization, Null Hypothesis, Vending Machine
25 Apr 2019
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Document Summary
Happiness and well-being are both abstract concepts - the sort of things whose very meaning philosophers debate. In order to use empirical methods to study how these relate to various factors in life and society, we first need to find empirically testable measures of well-being. Turning an abstract concept into something measurable is called operationalizing. Taking some abstract thing and coming up with an empirically testable method the concept basically. Ex: the mass: of a body is an abstract theoretical concept. When we say that a body has mass, simply saying it has a property doesn"t necessarily mean anything because you cannot see it. You need to explain what having mass does. You also need to go further and give a precise set of things to do to figure out how much mass something has. You have to have all the basic concepts before you can find the science.
