ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the role of measurement in the basic and applied research, theory testing, and program evaluation. Logical positivism arose in the 1920s as a school of philosophy that was primarily concerned with the logical analysis of scientific information. A key principle was verifiability, the assertion that a scientific statement is meaningful if and only if it can be proved true or false on the basis of experience. They also developed an accompanying video that enabled people to test observer's codings of representative behavior sequences of coaching behaviours depicted by an actor. In the history of medicine, experiential knowledge has served as the basis for procedures that physicians knew were effective from their clinical experience, including purging, blood-letting, blistering, and lobotomies. The theoretical model that guided the research required that develop ways of measuring the same behaviours at all three levels in a way that resulted in numerical, or quantitative, indices of the behaviors.
