POLSCI 381 Lecture 4: 2_7 Measurement Assignment
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Explore how other scholars define it first. 1) accuracy: aim for reliability and validity. Reliability: extent to which a measuring procedure yields the same results on repeated trials. The more consistent, the higher the reliability; the less consistent, the lower the reliability. Validity: extent to which a measure corresponds to the concept it was intended to measure. Broadly speaking, should contain as much relevant information as possible about the attribute we"re measuring. Use appropriate level of measurement: nominal, ordinal, and. Nominal: categories without order or rank: gender, party affiliation, country, religion. Ordinal: able to be ordered, but no mean or average. This doesn"t tell us anything about the distance between the categories. Interval: the values of a variable are rank-ordered and have equal distances between categories. Systematic (bias): if something about our measure is consistently wrong, it"s biased. All measures composed of truth and error. Do not conflate method with a measure.
