Exam 4: Section 2: Concepts, Operationalization, and Measurement

Every variable should have an important attribute of being exhaustive. For the variable to be useful in research, researchers must be able to classify every observation in terms of one of the attributes composing the variable. Being exhaustive means that the researcher should be able to classify _____.

Every variable must have the attribute of being mutually exclusive. Researchers must be able to classify every observation in terms of one and only one attribute. Being mutually exclusive means that each and every observation must fit in _____.

UCR summary data represent groups as units of analysis. Crime reports are available for cities or counties, and these may be aggregated upward to measure crime for states or regions of the United States.

Measurements can be made with varying degrees of precision, which refers to the fineness of the distinctions made between the attributes that compose a variable. The key standards for measurement quality are _____.

The most widely used measures of crime are not based on police records.

Day-to-day communication is made possible through general but often vague and unspoken agreements about the use of terms. This leads to imprecision and misunderstandings. ______ is the process by which we specify precisely what we mean when we use particular terms.

Generally measurement is the most important and difficult phase of criminal justice research. It is difficult, in part, because many basic concepts in criminal justice are difficult to define specifically. Without being able to agree on a conceptual definition, operationalizing and measuring concepts is _____.

The U.S. Census Bureau has conducted the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) since 1972, the longest continuous crime survey in the world.

Variables represent different levels of measurement: nominal, ordinal, interval, and ratio. Levels of measurement tell us what sorts of information we can gain from the scores assigned to the _____.

Variables' attributes that have the characteristics of exhaustiveness and mutual exclusiveness, can be logically ordered and the distance between one and the other values of the variables can be precisely measured are _____.

Crimes involve four elements that are often easier to recognize in the abstract than they are to actually measure: offender, victim, offense, and incident. The most basic of these elements is the _____.

Reliability refers to the fact whether a particular measurement technique, applied repeatedly to the same thing, will yield the same result each time. In other words, measurement reliability is roughly the same as measurement _____.

In a legal sense, victimless crimes do not exist because crimes are acts that injure society, organizations, or individuals.

The specification of concepts in scientific inquiry depends instead on conceptual and operational definitions. A conceptual definition is a working definition specifically assigned to a term. When there is disagreement and confusion over what a term really means, the scientist specifies a working definition for the purposes of the inquiry. This definition is called _____.

Specifications make up the operational definition of the concept-a definition that spells out precisely how the concept will be measured. In essence, an operational definition is a description of the operations undertaken in ______ a concept.

The design and execution of criminal justice research require that the confusion over concepts and reality is removed. The logicians and scientists have found it useful to distinguish three kinds of definitions: real, conceptual________________________.

The words or symbols in language that we use to represent these mental images are called concepts. The concepts are used to communicate with one another, to share our mental images. Although a common language enables us to communicate, it is important to recognize that the words and phrases we use represent abstractions. Concepts are abstract because they are _____.

The end product of the conceptualization process is the _____ of what we have in mind, indicating the presence or absence of the concept we are studying.

Variables attributes that have only the characteristics of exhaustiveness and mutual exclusiveness are _____. These measures can not be logically ordered. The distance between one and the other values of the variables can not be precisely measured.