SOC 201 Chapter Notes - Chapter 5: Operational Definition, Station Wagon
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When we set up that hypothesis, we posited a relationship between gender and occupation. To put it another way, we posited that men and women are likely to have different sorts of occupations. Testing this hypothesis will mean determining whether there is indeed a relationship between gender and occupation in the real world. Before we can test our hypothesis, however, we must create something called an operational definition for each of our variables. Creating an operational definition essentially involves transforming the variables into things that can be observed and measured. Generally, operationalizing a variable simply means listing its attributes so that you can count the presence or absence of those attributes in the real world. For example, in operationalizing gender, we can easily identify two attributes: Operationalizing occupation is a bit trickier, but we can still do it in a fairly straightforward manner. Here is one way we might operationalize occupation:
