Operationalization

Common card · No. 422897

In research design, especially in psychology, social sciences, life sciences and physics, operationalization (or operationalisation) is the definition of a method to measure a phenomenon despite the phenomenon being difficult to define. Operationalization thus provides a practical definition of a fuzzy concept so as to make it clearly distinguishable, measurable, and understandable by empirical observation. In a broader sense, it defines the extension of a concept—describing what is and is not an instance of that concept. 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. In these examples, the phenomena are difficult to directly observe and measure because they are general/abstract (as in the example of health) or they are latent...

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