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Social isolation1. Sometimes I feel all alone in the world.2. Real friends are as easy to find as ever.3. There are few dependable ties between people any more.4. People are just naturally friendly and helpful.Powerlessness5. I worry about the future facing today’s children.6. There are so many decisions that have to be made today that sometimes Icould just blow up.7. There is little chance for promotion on the job unless a man gets a break.8. We are just so many cogs in the machinery of life.Normlessness9. People’s ideas change so much that I wonder if we’ll ever have anything todepend on.10. Everything is relative, and there just aren’t any definite rules to live by.11. With so many religions abroad, one doesn’t really know which one tobelieve.Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.zaThe nature of the measuring instrument is determined by a variety of factors:the problem formulation, the methodological preferences of the researcher, thenature of the phenomenon, and so on. If the phenomenon of alienation were tobe studied amongst a smaller group of people, it is likely that the researcherwould employ qualitative methods such as in-depth interviews and participantobservation. The manifestations of alienation as they occur in literature or themedia such as newspapers or letters in newspapers, could be investigated bymeans of one of the forms of content analysis that are available. Morequantitative studies of alienation will probably be conducted by means of someform of interview schedule or questionnaire.It is essential that the central concepts in an investigation be operationalized,irrespective of the type of data collection technique that is envisaged. In thepreceding example we have indicated the nature of such operationalization in aquantitative study. However, even in a qualitative study where, for example,we are interested in investigating the degree of alienation evinced by a group ofpeople displaying pathological behaviour (for example, rapists), theinvestigators would have to have a clear grasp of the denotative dimensions ofalienation. If this were not the case, the investigators would be unable toidentify the manifestations of alienation correctly in the unstructured66