Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

The Foundations of Social Research 43
The operational definition of the variable ‘‘parents’ career aspirations for
their children’’ was useless. Here’s the operational definition that should have
been used in the study of Chicano parents’ aspirations for their children’s
careers:
Go to the homes of the respondents. Using the native language of the respondents
(Spanish or English as the case may be), talk to parents about what they want
their high school-age children to be doing in 10 years. Explore each answer in
depth and find out why parents give each answer.
Ask specifically if the parents are telling you what they think their children
will be doing or what they want their children to be doing. If parents hesitate,
say: ‘‘Suppose nothing stood in the way of your [son] [daughter] becoming anything
they wanted to be. What would you like them to be doing ten years from
now?’’
Write down what the parents say and code it for the following possible scores:
1 unambivalently in favor of children going into high-status occupations; 2
ambivalent about children going into high-status occupations; 3 unambivalently
in favor of children going into low- or middle-status occupations.
Use Stricker’s (1988) occupation scale to decide whether the occupations
selected by parents as fitting for their children are high, middle, or low status. Be
sure to take and keep notes on what parents say are the reasons for their selections
of occupations.
Notice that taking an ethnographic—a so-called qualitative—approach did not
stop us from being operational.
Operationism is often crude, but that, too, can be a strength. Robert Wuthnow
(1976) operationalized the concept of religiosity in 43 countries using
UNESCO data on the number of books published in those countries and the
fraction of those books classified as religious literature. Now that’s crude.
Still, Wuthnow’s measure of ‘‘average religiosity’’ correlates with seven out
of eight indicators of modernity. For example, the higher the literacy rate in
1952, the lower the religiosity in 1972.
I have no idea what that means, but I think following up Wuthnow’s work
with more refined measurements—to test hypotheses about the societal conditions
that support or weaken religiosity—is a lot more exciting than dismissing
it because it was so audaciously crude.
The Problem with Operationism
Strict operationism creates a knotty philosophical problem. We make up
concepts and measurement turns these abstractions into reality. Since there are
many ways to measure the same abstraction, the reality of any concept hinges