What is Operationalizing and How Do I Do It?

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I touched upon this when discussing how to chose your methods, but let's go into some more detail here. 

What is operationalizing?

Operationalizing refers to the way in which a construct is defined and measured in a research study.  In my previous example, I used childhood trauma and school performance.  These are each a construct (trauma and school performance), and we could operationalize these in many ways. 

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Childhood trauma:

experiencing psychical, emotional, or sexual abuse (....guess what, now you have to define each of these!)

experiencing the death of a parent, primary caretaker, or sibling

losing one's home due to financial reasons or a natural disaster

being hospitalized (...for anything? for certain things?)

School performance:

GPA, reported by student

GPA, reported by school

GPA, reported by parent

Score on last state wide standardized test

Lowest grade during a particular time period (last school year? within 6 months of trauma? what if trauma was ongoing?)

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So, lots of things to consider here.  We could go on and on, which is why it is a very important process. If I define trauma as having been hospitalized and that includes children with non-life threatening illness I might come up with a relationship between "trauma" and school performance that is weaker than if I included children who experienced sexual abuse.  So, yeah, it's real important how you chose to define these things.  AND, if we want all the literature on childhood trauma to tell an overarching story, it's hard if studies are defining these things differently and we don't know how.  If we do know how things are defined, we cannot filter them appropriately. 

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How to operationalize your variables

As always, you start with the literature.  But, this time, instead of looking at the literature review section, read the methods.  Look particularly at the measure/questions/prompts/procedures.  How did they measure the construct?  This will help you think about ways to do it.  You should start to see what is typically accepted in the filed you are researching in and give you direct citations for copies of questions (do not make up your own...more about that here). 

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Remember, you are the master of your work!  Pick what makes sense to you for what you are after.  As long as you clearly state what you are doing and it links with your actual goal, you are okay.  Here are some final thoughts borrowed from another page on my website:

 

What is the relationship between childhood trauma and academic performance? 

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This is a very broad question because there is no clear indication of exactly what is meant by "childhood trauma" and "academic performance".  It is VERY important that we define these specifically in a way that helps determine how to measure them.  We call this operationalizing. Here is what I mean:

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"In this study, I will examine the relationship between childhood trauma and academic performance. Childhood trauma is defined as "the experience of an event by a child that is emotionally painful or distressful, which often results in lasting mental and physical effects" (NIH, 2019).  In this study, such emotionally painful or distressful events will be categorized as including one of the following: sexual abuse, death of a parent, caretaker, or sibling, and/or physical abuse.  The severity and frequency of these events will be measured using Smith's (2019) Survey of Trauma.  School performance will be defined as grade point average and provided by the principal of each student's school." 

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See what I did there? You could run this study now even though I came up with it. You know exactly what I mean by trauma and school performance and you know precisely how to get that information. I started with a broad question and then narrowed in on the definition and way of measuring each variable. This is what you are aiming for. It takes time. 

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