It is good idea to start with the key terms activity to see that you have covered everything necessary.
“Measure what can be measured, and make measurable what cannot be measured.” - Galileo Galilei
In psychology, we can’t always measure what we want to measure. Biologists can measure protein quantities, physicists can measure time it takes for a pendulum to swing, but we never directly measure memory. We usually say we measure intelligence, friendliness, happiness, but we don’t. We construct the term of happiness and then we devise a method to measure it. So it can be biased, it can be wrong, it can be challenged. But that is OK :)
Whereas definition talks about what a thing like happiness is, operationalisation speaks of a process of actually measuring it. It derives from the definition. If we say that happy are those who have money, then operationalisation of happiness is the quantity of money. If we define intelligence as an ability to solve tasks, we create a tests which ask people to solve tasks which we consider that “intelligent” people should solve. But mistakes can happen.
Old intelligence tests for example tackled a lot of mathematical thinking or memory, completely ignoring verbal or spatial skills. Some tests of memory asked people to remember numbers, ignoring that some people are rubbish at remembering numbers but they can remember thousands of faces and names. How we define and how we operationalise our terms will define if our research is valid.
| Name | URL |
|---|---|
| Experimental designs | https://www.simplypsychology.org/experimental-designs.html |
| Science isn't broken | https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/science-isnt-broken/#part1 |