Читать книгу The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Medical Sociology - Группа авторов - Страница 47

If a researcher has numerical data, then they’ll use quantitative methods for the analysis. A numerical array of data typically consists of columns representing study variables and rows containing observations of variables for each case/participant. For example, if we collected information about years of schooling from a sample of 100 adults, then each of the 100 rows would contain the education of a single participant. Variables are chosen through a process called operationalization (or simply measurement) in which researchers choose how to empirically represent concepts from their research questions. Because of the diversity of perspectives in medical sociology, most peer-reviewed journals require researchers to provide rigorous justifications for their measurement choices. This makes careful operationalization a critical feature of quantitative research in medical sociology (Aneshensel 2002; Link 2002; McAlpine et al. 2018).