CRJU lecture 5

Terms

  • nominal measures

  • Ordinal measures

  • Interval measures

  • Ratio measures

  • Test-retest method

  • Interrater reliability

  • Split-half method

  • Face validity

  • Criterion-related validity

  • Construct validity

  • Content validity

  • Multiple measures

  • Emotional intelligence

  • Indicator

  • Stress Resilience

  • Dimension

  • Concepts

  • Reifications

  • Direct observables

  • Indirect observables

  • Real

  • Constructs

  • Conceptual

  • Crime seriousness

  • Operational

  • Measurement

  • Exhaustive measurement

  • Mutually exclusive measurement

  • Validity

  • Reliability

  • Composite measures

  • Taxonomy

  • Typologies

  • Conceptualization

Concepts

  • words, phrases, or symbols in a language that are used to represent these understandings (images) in communication

    • examples include gender, punishment, chivalry, delinquency, poverty, intelligence, racism, sexism, assault, deviance, and income

  • Direct observances: things or qualities we can observe directly (color, shape)

  • Indirect observables: require more subtle, complex, or indirect observations for things that cannot be observed directly (reports, court transcripts)

  • Constructs: theoretical creations; cannot be observed directly or indirectly. Similar to concepts

  • Conceptualization

    • process of specifying precisely what we mean when we use particular terms

Indicators and Dimensions

  • Crime seriousness can be divided into dimensions

    • Dimension (characteristic focused on)- harm to victim (or society)

    • Indicators- physical injury, economic loss, psychological consequences

Confusion over definitions and reality

  • concepts are abstract mental (understandings) images that summarize collections of seemingly related observations and experiences

    • terms we use to describe them do not have real and concrete meanings

  • Deification is the process of regarding as real things that are not

    • we make up conceptual summaries of real observations and because they are convenient we begin to think they are real

Creating conceptual order

  • real- essential nature or attributes- extremely vague and inherently subjective

  • Conceptual- working definition specifically assigned to a term provides focus to our observations

  • Operational- spells out precisely how the concept will be measured

Measurement

  • The process of assigning numbers or labels to units of analysis in order to represent these understandings conceptual properties

Exhaustive and exclusive measurement

  • exhaustive- you should be able to classify every observation in terms of one of the attributes composing the variable

  • Mutually exclusive- must be able to classify every observation in terms of one and only one attribute

Levels of measurement

  • nominal measures- offers names or labels for characteristics (race, gender)

  • Ordinal measures- have attributes that can be logically rank ordered (education, opinions, occupational status )

  • Interval measures- have meaningful distances between attributes (temperature, IQ)

  • Ratio Measures- have a true zero point (income, sentence length)

Reliability

  • a matter of whether a particular measurement technique, repeatedly applied to the same object, would yield the same result each time (statistician usage)

  • test retest method- if we make the same measurement more than once, we should expect the same response both times

  • Interrater reliability- compare measurements from different eaters; verify initial measurements with subsample of the respondents

  • Split half method- make more than one measurement of any concept; see if each measures the concept differently