ABSTRACT
Statistics perform an erasure, which is enhanced when numbers are used out of context. Too often numbers essentialize and create reality without troubling their derivation. This chapter explores how measurement instruments create, rather than reflect, reality. Social scientists often use secondary data to conduct research. The most popular tool for social science research is the questionnaire. The history of the questionnaire as data collection tool provides insight into the motivations of the researchers who developed this as method. Observation itself is tangled in material discursive practices, and so is the instrument that uses to measure a thing. Whether questionnaire, interview tool, survey, and so on, the measurement instrument is a part of the ontological study. The object and the measurement apparatus co-create each other, and the act of observation creates the outcome. The material aspect of measurement, the physical act of it, couples with the meanings applied to the measurement outcomes.
