Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

The Foundations of Social Research 37
do you measure future orientation or machismo? Measuring variables like
these is one of our biggest challenges because these variables are mostly what
we’re interested in.
One of the most famous variables in all of social science is ‘‘socioeconomic
status’’ (SES). Measuring it is no easy task. You can use income as one indicator,
but there are many wealthy people who have low SES (the so-called nouveau
riche), and many relatively low-income people who have high SES (think
of those down-at-the-heels nobles in England who have to open their castles
to tourists to make ends meet).
You can add ‘‘level of education’’ to income as an indicator, but that still
won’t be enough in most societies of the world to get at something as multidimensional
as SES. You can add occupation, father’s occupation, number of
generations in a community, and so on, depending on the group you are studying,
and you still might wind up dissatisfied with the result if your measure
fails to predict some dependent variable of interest.
And, as you saw with the Bem androgyny scale earlier, indicators of any
concept may vary from culture to culture. This doesn’t mean that measurement
is impossible. It means that you have to test (and, if necessary, adapt) every
measure of every variable in every new culture where you want to use it.
Conceptual and Operational Definitions
While most of the interesting variables in social science are concepts, some
of our most important concepts are not variables. The concept of ‘‘positivism’’
is not a variable, but the concept of ‘‘philosophies of science’’ is a variable,
and positivism is one member of the list of those philosophies. The concept
of ‘‘love’’ is not a variable, but the concept of ‘‘being in love or not’’ is one.
The concept of ‘‘culture’’ is not a variable, but the concept of ‘‘belonging to a
particular culture’’ is one. The concept of ‘‘attitude’’ is not a variable, but the
concept of ‘‘supporting the idea that clitoridectomy is a violation of fundamental
human rights’’implies an attitude variable with at least two attributes,
support and nonsupport.
Conceptual Definitions
There are two ways to define variables—conceptually and operationally.
Conceptual definitions are abstractions, articulated in words, that facilitate
understanding. They are the sort of definitions we see in dictionaries, and we