Variables

5 Key excerpts on "Variables"

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  eBook - ePub

  Research Methods for Everyday Life

  Blending Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches

  • Scott W. VanderStoep, Deidre D. Johnson(Authors)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Jossey-Bass

    (Publisher)

  individual-difference variable is a measure of some inherent trait, disposition, or personality difference. An individual-difference variable can be numeric or categorical. One of the most common categorical individual-difference Variables is gender. Race and ethnicity are also commonly used as categorical independent Variables in social science research. Examples of numeric individual-difference Variables are income, SAT score, or score on a political-conservatism scale. These Variables are considered predictor Variables because participants are not assigned to a level of that variable; rather, their score is part of the dispositional, historical, or cultural makeup of a research participant.

  In summary, whether the research is experimental or correlational, the independent variable is on the front end of the research study, with the goal of determining its relationship to the dependent variable, which we discuss next.

  Dependent Variables

  As mentioned in Chapter 2, a dependent variable is the outcome measure in which researchers are interested. In correlational research, a dependent variable is sometimes called a criterion variable. To collect measurements of dependent Variables, researchers observe, test, or survey the research participants. The dependent variable is what is measured by the observation, test, or survey. As we discuss later in this chapter, dependent Variables can be collected in a variety of ways, including performance measures (for example, school grades, total sales), self-report measures (for example, attitudes, depression inventory), or physiological measures (for example, heart rate).

  Critical to effective research is a clear understanding of the Variables in your study. Whatever term is used, these Variables are the outcomes of interest in a research study. One way this goal is achieved is by providing operational definitions of your dependent Variables, as discussed in Chapter 3. An operational definition defines how a variable will be measured or assessed. Having a clear operational definition is important for many reasons. As we mentioned in Chapter 3, clear operational definitions are valuable because other researchers can replicate your research; that is, conduct a similar study to determine if similar results can be obtained. Another reason a clear operational definition is important is because unlike in the physical sciences, where agreements about measurements are commonly understood, consensus on measurement is not as easily achieved in the social sciences. For example, researchers may differ on what constitutes school achievement, juvenile delinquency, depression, or political conservatism. By being clear about operational definitions, other researchers can determine how their operational definitions are different or the same, and how differences in the definitions may affect research findings. If one educational researcher defines “gifted” as scoring above the 95th percentile on a nationally normed achievement test and another researcher defines “gifted” as scoring above the 98th percentile on an aptitude

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  Naming the Mind

  How Psychology Found Its Language

  • Kurt Danziger(Author)
  • 1997(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  One difference between the situation in Sociology and that in Psychology was that, in the case of the latter, the adoption of the language of Variables had a more automatic, non-reflective, quality. Such critical voices as existed (e.g. Cantril, 1950) were either marginalized or simply ignored. In Sociology, however, there was quite a powerful alternative tradition – particularly in the form of symbolic interactionism – which provided a basis for a direct attack on the inappropriate application of the concept of the variable. In 1956 Howard Blumer, a figure of considerable influence in American Sociology, launched a highly visible critique of the use of Variables in his discipline. That use, he thought, was too often based on the ‘basic fallacy’ that independent Variables exerted their influence ‘automatically’ without the intervention of interpretive processes among the persons acted upon. Analysis in terms of Variables had become a way of eliminating questions of meaning from the explanation of human conduct. A variable constitutes ‘a distinct item with a unitary qualitative make-up’ (Blumer, 1956: 688), but the items that are important in the meaningful world of human action are neither clearly distinct from one another, nor do they remain qualitatively unchanged, irrespective of context. Blumer’s analysis may actually have strengthened the resolve of some of his colleagues to stick to their Variables, for the attraction of this style of social scientific practice was precisely that it enabled one to replace the messiness and ambiguity of the ‘subjective’ analysis of meaning with the investigator’s distinct constructs that always remained the same, no matter what the context.

  A more detailed textual analysis of empirical papers published in psychological journals during the period under review indicates that talk about Variables did indeed have the function of avoiding the issue of meaning. Explanation in terms of the meaning of situations for experimental subjects is consistently eschewed in favour of a model in which persons ‘respond’ under the ‘influence’ of ‘Variables’ that have the solidity of physical objects. A typical example is a study of Rorschach responses in relation to depression scores on a widely used personality inventory, the MMPI (Blake and Wilson, 1950). Both measures are of course constructions of scientific psychology which depend on the interpretations that individuals make when placed in certain situations. However, when the study is reported in approved journal form, there is no reference to this. Instead, we get talk of depression as an ‘adjustmental variable [which] directly influences perceptual selectivity’ (p. 459). Referring to depression as an ‘adjustmental variable’ (‘operationally defined’ by MMPI scores) transforms it from a qualitative feature of subjective worlds into an objective entity that varies only in degree and that has causal effects on other objective entities, like ‘Rorschach deterrninants’ in our illustrative example. The language of Variables was thus the perfect vehicle for an eclectic kind of neo-behaviourism that wished to banish subjective meaning as an explanatory principle without any commitment to specific

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  eBook - ePub

  Personality as an Affect-processing System

  Toward An Integrative Theory

  • Jack Block(Author)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 2

    Some Logical, Psycho-Logical, and Definitional Matters        

  In this chapter, before commencing the theory proper, it is useful to consider more closely a variety of current developmental issues with implications for theoretical matters soon to arise and for the field more generally.

  TWO KINDS OF PSYCHOLOGICAL Variables

  With constructs that stay close to obvious observation or experience, I suggest that it is difficult and perhaps impossible to formulate dimensions or Variables that have conceptual properties. This statement requires elaboration along several different lines.

  A variable has conceptual properties for a theory of personality, in my terms, if separately or in conjunction with other Variables it can generate a web of nontautological consequences, consequences that are not circularly entailed by the way the variable has been defined. Variables that might be mentioned as having conceptual properties include susceptibility to interference, intolerance of ambiguity, anxiety level, personal tempo, extroversion, empathic sensitivity, ability to maintain integrated performance when under stress , and the like. Historically, conceptual Variables have been both esthetic in property and theoretically satisfying.

  Consider now such Variables used in personality research as adjustment, neuroticism, social effectiveness, conduct disorder, hardiness, agreeableness, positive character integration, survivorship, mastery motivation, academic conscientiousness , and even many interpretations of the psychoanalytic conception of ego-strength . All of these Variables—herein termed societal dimensions of personality

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  Understanding and Evaluating Research in Applied and Clinical Settings

  • George A. Morgan, Jeffrey A. Gliner, Robert J. Harmon(Authors)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  Dependent Variables are scores from a test, ratings on questionnaires, or readings from instruments (e.g., electrocardiogram). It is common for a study to have several dependent Variables (e.g., performance and satisfaction). In the DiLorenzo et al. (2004) study, there were many dependent Variables such as various aspects of physical and mental health as well as quality of life. The Redding et al. (1990) study had three main dependent Variables: performance on the mastery task, pleasure after solving a task, and performance on the harder tasks. Extraneous Variables These are Variables that are not of interest in a particular study but could influence the dependent variable. Environmental factors (e.g., temperature or distractions), time of day, other attributes of the participants, and characteristics of the investigator or therapist are some possible extraneous Variables that need to be controlled by methods such as holding them constant, randomization, statistics, or matching. Levels of a Variable The word level is commonly used to describe the values of an independent variable. This does not necessarily imply that the values are ordered from low to high. Suppose an investigator was interested primarily in comparing two different treatments and a third no-treatment control group. The study could be conceptualized as having one independent variable, treatment type, with three levels, the two treatment conditions and the control condition. Other Considerations About Variables Many studies such as Gliner and Sample (1996) have independent Variables that have a few levels (the intervention or no intervention) and dependent Variables that have many ordered levels (the degree of quality of life). However, in the associational/correlational approach, both independent and dependent Variables usually have many ordered levels (such as degree of maternal depression and infant task performance)

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  Readings in Ethnic Psychology

  • Pamela Balls Organista, Kevin Chun, Gerardo Marin, Pamela Balls Organista, Kevin Chun, Gerardo Marin(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  For example, many of the factors we ordinarily treat as independent Variables, or at least as relevant factors that need to be controlled, are not psychological Variables at all (Sechrest, 1976, 1977). Education level, sex, socioeconomic status, and all our other favorite demographic Variables are themselves no more psychological than is culture, but we have become so accustomed to using such Variables as stand-ins for the correlated psychological factors that progress toward understanding the underlying concepts has virtually stopped in many areas. For example, many mainstream researchers routinely match subjects for education level, but merely having the same number of years of schooling does not automatically render two subjects equivalent on any psychological dimension. “If the researcher … is unable to specify in advance the psychological Variables for which [demographic Variables] are surrogates, then the research promises to be little more than a fishing expedition” (Sechrest, 1977, p. 77). This point is applicable to both within-culture and cross-cultural research, but the consequences of ignoring it are more severe cross-culturally. As a result, the importance of specifying the relevant underlying psychological Variables has been more widely recognized (although not perhaps more widely practiced) in cross-cultural psychology. Thus, adopting a psychological view of cultural Variables may also facilitate exploration for related Variables in mainstream research.

  Moreover, Variables identified as cultural in cross-cultural studies may be identified as social in within-culture research, so clarification of relations at a psychological rather than a demographic or sociocultural level in either subdiscipline will have positive ramifications for the other. For example, sex differences have been noted for a number of diagnostic categories in this country: Antisocial personality disorder and alcohol abuse and dependence are found predominantly in men, whereas agoraphobia and major depression are found predominandy in women (Robins et al., 1984). Biological sex may play some role in these differences, and to the extent that similar sex differences are found in widely diverse societies around the world, the role of biological factors must be seriously considered (cf. the relatively constant proportion of men and women with schizophrenia worldwide). However, it is also likely that psychological or sociocultural factors account for a large portion of the variance. Research in countries where different ratios of men to women are obtained for these disorders may illuminate the factors underlying the sex differences seen in this country.

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