Title: Operationalisation – developing indicators for concepts
Course: UGQuants (SSPS) > Section: Survey Design

Operationalisation – developing indicators for concepts

In order to develop our survey instrument, we must translate the broad concepts we are interested in exploring into a form that we can measure. The process of doing so is known as operationalisation.

Once we have clarified our concepts, we need to move from the abstract to the measurable and concrete by translating our abstract concepts into a set of measurable indicators which together comprise an empirical representation of the concept. To do so, we need to identify the various dimensions of the concept and decide how these will be measured.

The process of operationalisation can essentially be summarised by the following steps:

 |  | Identify concepts of interest.
 |  | Develop definitions of the concepts.
 |  | For each concept identify the relevant dimensions and sub-dimensions and decide which dimension(s) we want to focus on.
 |  | Develop indicators for each dimension.

This process of operationalisation is probably best illustrated by reference to an example. Let’s say our survey is looking to explore poverty. Poverty is an abstract concept which we are therefore looking to measure. Whilst the term poverty has no universally agreed upon definition, it has been defined as ‘An enforced lack of socially perceived necessities’ (Mack & Lansley, 1985:39). Within this definition, a number of dimensions must be considered, including housing, food, clothes, household goods, quality of life and financial security. We might want to develop indicators for all the identified dimensions of poverty or we may simply want to focus on specific dimensions, for instance, financial security. We therefore need to develop an appropriate measure of financial security.

The British Household Panel Survey asks the following question which aims to provide a measure of respondents’ financial security:

‘How well would you say you yourself are managing financially these days?

Would you say you are…

      - Living comfortably
      - Doing alright
      - Just about getting by
      - Finding it quite difficult
      - Or finding it very difficult’

We may decide to use this one indicator of financial security or we may wish to develop a number of other indicators which will collectively comprise our measure of financial security as a dimension of the abstract concept of poverty.

As will be seen, the appropriateness of our indicators and measures will be evaluated in pre-testing and piloting before we administer our survey.