SOC 302 Chapter Notes - Chapter 1: Abraham Kaplan, Operationalization
Document Summary
Is it truly possible to measure the stuff of life: love, hate, prejudice, religiosity, radicalism, alienation. Measurement: careful, deliberate observations of the real world for the purpose of describing objects and events in terms of the attributes composing a variable. Prejudice: a name that represents a collection of apparently related phenomena that we"ve each observed in the course of life (we made it up) Prejudice differs from individual to individual since experiences in life are always varied. Conception: mental images of our opinions and perspectives. Conceptualization: the process of coming to an agreement about what terms mean in social research. Concept: the result of conceptualization (agreed meaning of a conception) Our nationality, gender, race, ethnicity, region, language, and other cultural factors can shade our understanding of concepts. Dictionaries formalize the agreements our society has about such terms. Each person then shapes his/her mental images to correspond with such agreements. Abraham kaplan distinguishes three classes of things that scientists measure.
