COMM 101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Operationalization, Face Validity

• School: U of M
• Department: Communication Studies
• Course: COMM 101
• Professor: Julia Lippman

Document Summary

When choosing a question and answers, this is an operational de nition for your concept. Go from initial concepts, to a nominal de nition, to an operational de nition. Various response options mean that you are de ning the concept differently for the purposes of measurement. Four levels of measurement: nominal: there are response options/attributes (yes and no) Examples: gender - male, female, race - black, white, asian, other. Any variable with only two options is nominal. Only nominal if it doesn"t t any other categories: ordinal: response options, in a meaningful order (yearly, monthly, weekly, daily) The categories must be in order for it to be ordinal. If the categories are of different sizes, but they are in order, then the variable is ordinal. If it is ordinal, it is no longer nominal: interval: ordinal, but evenly spaced (1, 2, 3, etc. ) The difference between categories must be of consistent sizes to be interval.