US Operationalization Events

For this assignment, you’ll use the provided worksheet to break down, and operationalize the constructs included in each of your three research questions. A construct is an abstract idea, underlying theme, or subject matter that one chooses to study. These are often words or phrases that have a a generally understood meaning, but for research purposes, there is the need to further define, or operationalize, them.

For example, let’s say you have a research question that asks, “What is the effect of hunger on academic performance among children?” In this question, there are several constructs that would need to be operationalized in order to effectively answer this question. The first construct we need to operationalize is “hunger.” While we have general understanding of what hunger is, the way we define it can have a real effect on our results. If we operationalize hunger as simply, “the feeling of being hungry and wanting to eat,” this could include almost anyone at a given time during the day. Your sample could include the entire range of individuals from those who are malnourished and underfed to those who simply forgot to have breakfast that morning. However, if we operationalize hunger as, “a chronic undernourishment of an individual due to a lack or or scarcity of food,” this not only refers to a more severe typeof hunger, but also changes who you would want to include in a sample. Therefore, the way in which we operationalize our constructs/variables in the questions we ask can have a huge impact on the results you end up with.