Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

44 Chapter 2
on the device you use to measure it. So, sea temperature is different if you
measure it from a satellite (you get an answer based on radiation) or with a
thermometer (you get an answer based on a column of mercury). Intelligence
is different if you measure it with a Stanford-Binet test, or the Wechsler scales.
If you ask a person in any of the industrialized nations ‘‘How old are you?’’
or ‘‘How many birthdays have you had?’’ you will probably retrieve the same
number. But the very concept of age in the two cases is different because different
instruments (queries are instruments) were used to measure it.
This principle was articulated in 1927 by Percy Bridgman in The Logic of
Modern Physics, and has become the source of an enduring controversy. The
bottom line on strict operational definitions is this: No matter how much you
insist that intelligence is really more than what is measured by an intelligence
test, that’s all it can ever be. Whatever you think intelligence is, it is exactly
and only what you measure with an intelligence test and nothing more.
If you don’t like the results of your measurement, then build a better test,
where ‘‘better’’ means that the outcomes are more useful in building theory,
in making predictions, and in engineering behavior.
I see no reason to waffle about this, or to look for philosophically palatable
ways to soften the principle here. The science that emerges from a strict operational
approach to understanding variables is much too powerful to water
down with backpedaling. It is obvious that ‘‘future orientation’’ is more than
my asking someone ‘‘Do you buy large or small boxes of soap?’’ The problem
is, you might not include that question in your interview of the same respondent
unless I specify that I asked that question in that particular way.
Operational definitions permit scientists to talk to one another using the
same language. They permit replication of research and the accumulation of
knowledge about issues of importance. The Attitudes Toward Women Scale
(AWS) was developed by Janet Spence and Robert Helmreich in 1972.
Through 1995, the scale had been applied 71 times to samples of American
undergraduate students (Twenge 1997).
Some of the items on the AWS seem pretty old-fashioned today. For example,
in one item, people are asked how much they agree or disagree with the
idea that ‘‘women should worry less about their rights and more about becoming
good wives and mothers.’’ You probably wouldn’t use that item if you
were building an attitudes-toward-women scale today, but keeping the original,
1972 AWS intact over all this time lets us track attitudes toward women
over time.
The results are enlightening. Attitudes toward women have, as you’d guess,
become consistently more liberal/feminist over time, but men’s support for
women’s rights have lagged behind women’s support by about 15 years:
Men’s average score on the AWS in 1990 was about the same as women’s