ABSTRACT
Central to doing survey research is understanding the idea of operationalization and how to go from ideas to concepts to variables. This chapter shows how to write hypotheses using independent and dependent variables and how to evaluate the reliability and validity of measures. The simplest, and perhaps least useful statistically, is the nominal level of measurement. Nominal variables use discrete measures whose values represent named categories of classification. When the category values for a variable are in sequence, the measurement is considered ordinal. The chapter distinguish the different levels of measurement and discusses the various kinds of reliability and validity, and create one-directional, two-directional, and null hypotheses. Central to a research design is the construction of research questions and hypotheses to guide the project. Achieving reliability and validity is part of the process of operationalizing the variables in research questions and hypotheses. And operationalization is ultimately accomplished by the process of writing a questionnaire.
