Читать книгу Methods in Psychological Research - Annabel Ness Evans - Страница 54

To generate testable hypotheses, you must operationalize your concepts. An operational definition is a description of how a concept will be measured. We talked a bit about the Harlows’ research earlier. One of their research questions was “Is contact comfort a source of attachment in monkeys?” How did they make the concepts contact comfort and attachment measurable? Read on.

They created what they called a surrogate “mother monkey” made of wire and a second made of soft fabric. In essence, their operational definition of high-contact comfort was the soft, cuddly “mother,” and their operational definition of low-contact comfort was the cold wire “mother.” Attachment was operationalized as the “mother” the infant clung to when stressed.

Students often ask us how they can tell whether an operational definition is a good one or not. This is an excellent question. Just because one researcher has an operational definition of a concept does not guarantee that it is a good operational definition. We usually advise students to read the literature in the area and see what most researchers tend to do, check whether measures of reliability and validity have been taken, and go from there.

Once you have defined your research topic and generated testable hypotheses, you then must determine which variables you are going to manipulate, which variables you will control, and which variables you will measure.