Operationalization

Operationalization thus defines a fuzzy concept so as to make it clearly distinguishable, measurable, and understandable by empirical observation.

For example, in medicine, the phenomenon of health might be operationalized by one or more indicators like body mass index or tobacco smoking.

As another example, in visual processing the presence of a certain object in the environment could be inferred by measuring specific features of the light it reflects.

Operationalization helps infer the existence, and some elements of the extension, of the phenomena of interest by means of some observable and measurable effects they have.

So the criticism is that there are potentially infinite concepts, each defined by the methods that measured it, such as angle of sighting, day of the solar year, angular subtense of the moon, etc.

In the 1930s, Harvard experimental psychologist Edwin Boring and students Stanley Smith Stevens and Douglas McGregor, struggling with the methodological and epistemological problems of defining measurement of psychological phenomena, found a solution in reformulating psychological concepts operationally, as it had been proposed in the field of physics by Bridgman, their Harvard colleague.

This resulted in a series of articles that were published by Stevens and McGregor from 1935, that were widely discussed in the field of psychology and led to the Symposium on operationism in 1945, to which Bridgman also contributed.

Previously, no one had paid any attention to the different operations used because they always produced the same results,[10] but the key insight of Einstein was to posit the Principle of Equivalence that the two operations would always produce the same result because they were equivalent at a deep level, and work out the implications of that assumption, which is the General Theory of Relativity.

Thus, a breakthrough in science was achieved by disregarding different operational definitions of scientific measurements and realizing that they both described a single theoretical concept.

Rather, other measures are used by outside observers, such as facial expression, choice of vocabulary, loudness and tone of voice.

One of the main critics of operationalism in social science argues that "the original goal was to eliminate the subjective mentalistic concepts that had dominated earlier psychological theory and to replace them with a more operationally meaningful account of human behavior.

Thus in psychology, as in economics, the initial, quite radical operationalist ideas eventually came to serve as little more than a "reassurance fetish"[14] for mainstream methodological practice.

For example, in the United States the concept distance driven would be operationalized as miles, whereas kilometers would be used in Europe.

For formal hypotheses the concepts are represented empirically (or operationalized) as numeric variables and tested using inferential statistics.

[20] Robert Yin recommends developing a case study protocol as a way to specify the kinds of evidence needed during the data collection phases.