-: Hello, and welcome to the video lecture
on conceptualization.
I'm going to show you a model on how to measure something
that does not have a clear way of measure,
that doesn't have an accepted way to measure,
that has no units,
but that you want
to be able to understand
whether it's present or absent,
whether it's strong or weak,
a high or low, things like that.
So we're gonna talk about measurement
and this model of conceptualization
and the four steps,
which are dimensions, indicators, variables, and attributes,
and I'm gonna walk you through all this.
So some things can be easily measured.
Many times they have units.
Certain behaviors,
you can see does someone buy some good or service or not?
Numerical values.
A lot of economic variables
have easy ways to measure in dollars,
sales, or profits, or costs.
There's ways to measure someone's height or weight,
someone's age.
Those all have sort of straightforward
and accepted ways to measure,
but many things don't.
And for these things,
we need to sort of design a way of measuring it.
Something like awareness,
belief, or attitudes towards something,
which is things that we measure
very often in social science.
And there is no attitude-ometer,
there is no wand that you could hold over someone
and know what their attitudes are,
so you sort of have to build it.
So we start with a conception,
that thing that we wanna measure,
some sort of mental image or mental concept.
So I made a list here,
whether something is fair, or ethical, or effective,
whether someone support or agrees with
that there's no well known way of measuring it,
so again, we have to construct it.
So this process is called conceptualization,
and it's the way to take this
sort of fuzzy ill-defined concept
into a clear, specific way of measuring
how people vary on this.
How much does someone's agreement,
or someone's awareness,
or the favorability or unfavorability
of someone's attitude vary among individuals?
So two examples might be what makes a business sustainable?
If a business calls itself that, how do you know?
Is it just because it calls itself that
or is a way to dig deeper and sort of put some nuance there?
You could think too
that UVM has prepared me for life after college.
So what does that mean?
Does it mean that you can immediately have a good job?
Is it your ability to think critically?
Did we instill a love of lifelong learning?
All of those things
might be ways that you would want to understand
how well UVM has prepared you.
So again, this is the way,
conceptualization is this process
that we define what research terms mean.
They're sort of working agreements that you make
with your readers or your co-researchers.
And it's the path from a concept to measurement,
and it's a sort of clear way
that you are defining,
creating and defining on how to measure something.
Again, how to measure variation
among humans, or businesses,
or locations, or things like that.
So I'm gonna walk you through this model
where we start at the top of the funnel
and work our way down
with sort of key steps in between.
So we start with a concept, this fuzzy image,
sustainability, or value,
or the effectiveness,
the value of my class, say.
So the first thing that we do
is we try to break it into its parts
and we call those dimensions.
So a very well-known model
is when when you're looking about at sustainable agriculture
or a sustainable business,
you can break it into three parts
of the economic, the environmental,
and the social dimensions of it.
So those that are strong in all three of those,
you might say that they are more sustainable
than are those that are not strong
in any or or in all three.
And then our next step is to think about
what are the indicators for each of these dimensions?
Sometimes we could just jump
right to indicators
or jump right into dimensions,
but for now we're going to use all four parts of this model.
So you think about what are the indicators
of environmental sustainability?
So you might wanna think of soil biodiversity,
a low carbon footprint,
a low amount
of pollution,
and think about that
when you think about the social indicators,
they might be farm worker safety,
they may be diversity of the farmers
or the diversity of those who eat there.
And for the economic,
things like the viability of the farm
and the degree to it,
it supports the local economy.
So there are many that you could choose,
there's never one exact right way,
we wouldn't all do it the same way.
But the key is you do it in such a way
that your reader or your co-researchers
will see it and say, "Yes, that makes sense that,
that's a reasonable approach
and I understand what you did and why."
Now, variables
are ways of measuring
whether this indicator
is sort of present or absent,
or high or low,
and you need to think about
what would be good variables for each indicator.
Another way of thinking,
so you can think about that your variables vary,
ways that they can be,
again, be present or absent,
high, medium, low,
things like that.
But the ability to measure each of these indicators.
And you can think about it as the questions on a survey.
How would you ask these questions on a survey?
And the sort of the questions are the variables.
So again,
to look at the economic dimension
and look at some of these two indicators
that some of the variables that you might look at
for farm viability are profit and loss,
net worth, debt ratio,
a lot of sort of financial variables.
For the indicator of support for the local economy
might be the number of employees,
their wages, and the percent of inputs
like seeds, and for fertilizers,
and other things that they purchase locally.
And do you see that by understanding
say their number of employees,
their wages, and percent of inputs,
that tells you something about how a farm
supports the local economy,
which tells you something about
their economic sustainability,
which tells you something about
their overall sustainability.
Finally, attributes
are like the answers
to those survey questions.
It's the individual's measure,
say the farm's measure
of their number of employees.
So if an employee,
if a firm has five employees,
then that their attribute is five.
So it's like sort of like the individual responses
to the survey are the attributes for that person
or that farm that you are measuring.
So to think about it again,
you start with the dimensions.
We'll put your sort of the parts or aspects,
you go for each dimension one or more indicators
which measure sort of high/low, or there or not.
Variables help you understand these,
what the indicators are,
that they're like the questions on a survey
and the attributes are
the individual's answers to a survey.
And if you know something,
when you have a set of attributes
that tells you sort of where they score on these variables
and which then tells you about something
about each indicator,
which again tells you something about each dimension,
which then tells you something
about the overall fuzzy concept.
So by understanding the attributes,
you've created a measure
to better understand the variability
of your various respondents.
So another example that's drawn from an article I wrote
now many years ago,
and we wondered why do farmers engage in farm to school?
Why do they sell to schools?
That we found that there's both social
and economic motivations.
And one of the indicators of social
was whether they sort of think food
can help the students know better
where food is from,
and who grows it, and things like this.
One of the variables is does this farm host
field trips for the student
and some individual does,
so that would be her attribute.
Before we talked about quality education experience,
so how would you measure,
say, the quality of my class
or the quality of your overall
UVM education?
And here are some parts.
So I just thought of here are some dimensions,
your critical skills,
your critical thinking, and your network,
sort of all of those
help to define the overall experience.
And we could think about the network
as sort of a number and the diversity of contacts
and that that would be a way that we could measure
that part of the networking dimension.
So here is a recap.
And I hope that you now understand this model
of measuring things as a sort of social phenomena
that we could use this
to measure anything that exists.
And I hope that you have a good day.
Thank you for watching.