Operational Definitions

An operational definition is a detailed specification of how one would go about measuring a

given variable. Operational definitions can range from very simple and straightforward to quite
complex, depending on the nature of the variable and the needs of the researcher. Operational
definitions should be tied to the theoretical constructs under study. The theory behind the
research often clarifies the nature of the variables involved and, therefore, would guide the
development of operational definitions that would tap the critical variables.

Clearly Stating the Operational Definition

There is an old saying that you can never be too rich. When it comes to operational definitions,
you can never be too detailed. The more clearly you specify the procedures, the more likely that
the procedures will be carried out precisely and the more likely that researchers who attempt to
replicate your work will use the same procedures.

Even for simple things, it it best to specify procedures in detail. For example, if you want to
weigh people in a study, you could just say "weigh them." That procedure seems obvious on the
surface, but how do you guarantee that the scale is working properly (standardizing the
measure) and what should you have your participants wear when they are being weighed. The
weight of street clothes can vary significantly depending on how cold it is or what you might be
carrying in your pockets. Those variation add error variance.

If you are having your participants take a psychological measure, you want to specify the
conditions under which the measure should be given. Some measures, for example, will be
answered differently depending on whether they are filled out privately or in a group. Some
measures are affected by distractions in the environment. That is one reason why admissions
exams like the SAT are often given under very strict conditions that are spelled out in detail for
the examiners.

If you are unsure of whether certain variations in procedures will affect the scores, err on the
side of caution and try to hold the procedures constant by specifying precise instructions for
measurement. You can often learn what factors are known to affect a measure by doing a
thorough library search of how that measure, or similar measures, have been used in the past.

Examples of Operational Definitions

The best way to illustrate the process of developing operational definitions for variables is to
identify several theoretical constructs and develop multiple operational definitions of each. This
not only illustrates how the process is done, but also shows that most constructs can be
measured in more than one way. The research literature also shows that it is common for
different operational definitions to tap different aspects of a construct and thus react differently
to experimental manipulations.

Anxiety

Anxiety is a concept that most of us are all too familiar with. It is an unpleasant feeling that
occurs in certain situations. It can disrupt our functioning if it is excessive, but it also motivates
behavior.
So how do you measure anxiety? How do you operationally define anxiety? Now this is a
problem that has challenged researchers for years, and many fine operational definitions of
anxiety are already available for our use. For the sake of this exercise, however, we will assume
that we have to develop our own measure without benefit of much of this existing research.

Since this is a concept that we have first-hand knowledge of, we might start the process of
operationally defining anxiety by asking ourselves what it is like. What do we feel? How do we
react? How do others react? What features in other people would suggest to us that they are
anxious? These are all excellent ways to start this process. It is especially useful to focus on
factors that indicate anxiety in others, because those are likely to be more objective and
observable factors and would provide higher reliability.

When we think of anxiety, we think first about the "feeling" of being anxious. We know what it is
like and we can easily tell when we are experiencing it. It is less clear whether others would be
able to tell that we are anxious just by looking at us. If fact, our own experience suggests that
we may be effectively hiding our anxiety, because some people have told us they were
impressed with how calm we were at a time when we felt anything but calm. Furthermore,
others have told us they were very anxious in a situation in which we had observed them and
they did not look anxious to us. Nevertheless, the feeling of anxiety is distinctive, even if it is not
always public, so it provides one way of measuring anxiety.

Since feelings are internal events, apparently without consistent external features, we will have
to rely on self-reports to find out whether a person is feeling anxious. We could simply ask
people to rate their level of anxiety on a 100-point scale, a technique that is commonly used.
These are often referred to as SUDS (subjective units of distress) ratings. We could instead ask
people a number of questions about their feelings, questions that tap elements of anxious
feelings. These might include things like "I am worried about what might happen." or "I can feel
my heart pound." The number of such items endorsed by the person would likely indicate the
level of anxiety. With mild anxiety, a few might be endorsed, but as the anxiety became more
intense, more and more of the items would be endorsed, because more of the anxiety
symptoms would be intense enough that the person noticed them.

We just mentioned something that probably resonated with many of you. When you are anxious,
your heart feels as if it is pounding, and when you are very anxious, you almost always
experience this sensation. This is a real effect. Anxiety is not just a feeling; it is also a
physiological response. When we are anxious, our heart beats faster and stronger, our muscles
tense and we shake, our palms sweat and sometimes even our face sweats, our voice may
crack or our face flush. Sometimes these effects are visible to others; often they are not unless
the anxiety is very strong.

We all have witnessed someone giving a talk in class who was visibly shaking, whose voice was
cracking, and whose face lit up the entire room with a red glow. We can use these responses to
provide another set of ways of operationally defining anxiety. We can measure the physiological
changes in people as an indication of their anxiety. If their heart rate increases, we would take
that as a sign of anxiety. If their palm sweats, that is another sign of anxiety. Without going into
the complexities of how one measures each of these things, we will just say that it is relatively
easy to do so, and that these measures have often been used to index the anxiety level of
participants in studies. With modern telemetry, it is even possible to monitor many of these
physiological responses while the person is carrying out everyday activities in his or her natural
environment.
Most of the people who were obviously nervous about giving a talk in school somehow got
through the talks, but a few quit in the middle, sometimes even leaving the room. This is yet
another indicator of anxiety--in this case, the behavior of fleeing the situation. We do not see it
often in classroom situations, but people who are anxious of snakes will often run away or at
least step back from the object of their fear. Furthermore, we often see avoidance of situations
that produce anxiety. Someone who has been very anxious giving talks in public may chose to
only take classes that do not require a presentation. He or she may even chose jobs later that
are unlikely to require a presentation, even though it may mean making considerably less or
having a less prestigious job. So behavior, both escape and avoidance, is yet another indicator
of anxiety.

We have outlined three separate strategies for operationally defining anxiety. They include (1)
asking people how anxious they are feeling, (2) measuring their physiological response, and (3)
observing their behavior, especially their escape and avoidance behavior. The natural question
for most students is which of these is the BEST measure of anxiety. In essence, which of the
measures captures true anxiety most precisely.

The answer to this question for anxiety is often frustrating to students, but reflects the complex
reality of human emotions. The answer is "It depends." Most students seem to prefer the
physiological measures, because they seem more "basic." Certainly, the physiological
measures have the advantage that we cannot deliberately lie about them. If we are anxious and
we don't want people to know that we are anxious, we can always lie about how we feel,
provided our anxiety is not so obvious that everyone can see signs of it. We can also stay in
situations in spite of intense anxiety to avoid losing face or to do something that we feel is
critical. Many nervous parents have spoken up at PTO meetings, because they thought it was
important to the well being of their children.

But physiological measures also have their problems. The heart rate will indeed go up when we
are anxious, but it also goes up for lots of other reasons as well. Walk up a flight of stairs and
your heart rate will have increased several beats a minute to meet the aerobic demand. Your
palms will sweat from nervousness, but they also sweat, along with the rest of your body, when
you are hot. The same is true of face flushing. Your muscles will tighten when nervous, but they
also tighten when you are expecting to act or are engaged in physical action. So none of our
measures of anxiety is ideal.

If none of our measures of anxiety is ideal, which one should we use. The best answer is "as
many as we can." The truth is that each of these measures capture a different aspect of the
construct of anxiety, and therefore they do not always agree with one another. For example,
people can avoid a situation without showing visible signs of anxiety, but the avoidance is a
strong indicator of their feeling about the situation. Even though there may be little physiological
arousal and they may claim to not be anxious, their avoidance is telling another story. The
validity of that other story can often be confirmed if the person is required to face what they
have been avoiding.

Looking at it from another perspective, we often see people with considerable anxiety, as
measured by their physiological responses, performing all of the things required of them.
Golfers might calmly sink a 10-foot putt to win a tournament, even though their heart might be
racing and their palms are dripping wet. So are they anxious or not? Scientifically, the fact that
these various measures of anxiety do not always agree has led to a much more thorough
understanding of anxiety. We now know that it is not a single construct, but rather represents a
complex collection of responses, and that the pattern that we will see will depend on the
situation that the person is in. We would never have been able to recognize that if we had not
operationally defined anxiety in several different ways and used all of those various definitions in
our research studies.

Civic Responsibility

Civic responsibility seems like a clear construct. People who are civic-minded are likely to do
what is expected of them by society. But what is it that is expected of a responsible citizen? Do
responsible citizens vote regularly? Do they agree to serve on juries? Do they donate time to
the Scouts or Little League baseball? Do they drive within the speed limit? Do they work to help
solve world hunger? Do they pay all the taxes that they owe? Must they do all of these things in
order to be a responsible citizen, or would a certain subset of these activities be sufficient?
Should some of these activities be considered mandatory of responsible citizens, like voting for
example? Would the late Harry Chapin, a well known song writer and performer, be considered
a responsible citizen? He gave as many as a hundred benefit concerts a year to combat world
hunger, but by most accounts drove like a maniac, collecting frequent speeding tickets. His
reckless driving eventually took his life in a fiery crash on the Long Island Expressway.

This rather clear construct suddenly gets fuzzy when you start wondering about how to measure
it? What behaviors should be included? What should be excluded? Do some behaviors bias you
against certain people. For example, would doctors who try to avoid jury duty, because of the
demands of caring for their patients, be responsible or irresponsible for their decision? Would
people who avoid activities, because they are uncomfortable around large groups of people,
appear to be irresponsible because they do not engage in important civic activities? The best
solution is to provide a standard set of behaviors that will be taken into account. As we will see,
these behaviors either can be taken from the person's everyday life or can be determined by
specified laboratory procedures.

Natural Environment Measures. Many psychological measures are based on looking at

samples of relevant behavior in natural environments. Sometimes these measure rely on the
self-report of behavior. Other times the behavior can be measured through standardized
observations of activities. For example, we could construct a measure of civic responsibility with
10 items that represent things that one believes that a responsible citizen would do. We could
ask people to rate on a scale how frequently they do each of those behaviors. The behaviors
may include things like voting, learning about the qualifications of candidates running for office,
staying informed about civic matters, supporting the activities of those who are working for the
community, and so on.

The more clearly we specify the items, the more likely each participant taking the measure will
interpret it the same. For example, an item like "I vote in most elections" is more ambiguous
than "I have voted in at least 4 of the last 5 elections." Items such as "I support the efforts of
community leaders" is so vague and open to interpretation that you would have no idea what
endorsing that item would say about the individual. If measures of this construct already existed
and the reliability and validity data for those measures were adequate, you would definitely want
to go with them. If not, you would have to develop your own measure, and then it would be your
responsibility to gather reliability and validity data as part of that process.

You might be asking yourself what would stop people from lying about their activities? The
answer is "not much," and of course some people would lie, or at least would try to put their
activities in the best possible light. There are ways to deal with this problem. One way is to have
some items that measure this tendency to place oneself in an overly favorable light. For
example, including items such as "I thoroughly investigate the qualifications of all candidates
before voting" would likely pick up the extent of such self-promotion. It is unlikely that anyone
THOROUGHLY investigates the qualifications of ALL candidates before voting, so those who
claim to do that are probably claiming other things that are less than accurate.

Some questionnaires are much more effective in giving an accurate indication of behavior if they
are completed anonymously. Structuring the research study so that such anonymous responses
are possible may dramatically improve the effectiveness of some measures. Clearly in this
situation, the operational definition includes not only the items of the psychological measure, but
also the conditions under which the measure should be administered.

Another way to guard against participants presenting themselves more favorably than is
warranted is to base your measure on publicly recorded data. For example, voting records and
jury participation records can often be accessed. We won't be able to know how people voted,
but we will know if they voted. Some public service activities, such a being on advisory boards,
are a matter of public record. Detailing a list of such public service activities as your operational
definition of civic responsibility, and then doing the leg work to track down the requisite
information, can provide a measure that is not contaminated by a tendency to inflate one's
actual civic-minded activity level. Of course, a disadvantage of this approach is that many civic-
minded activities are not public and therefore could not be included in this measure.

Laboratory Measures. If one thinks of civic responsibility as a trait, one would expect that it
would occur in many different settings. Therefore, one does not have to sample every possible
setting to get an idea of how civic-minded a person is. This opens the possibility that a
laboratory analogue could prove to be a very satisfactory measure of this construct.

Laboratory analogues are laboratory tasks that represent behavior that is believed to be similar
conceptually to the natural behavior in the community. The task need not take place in the
laboratory, but it will be under the control of the researcher. For example, the researcher could
call participants in the study to see if they are willing to do something that one would expect a
civic-minded individual to do. It might be something like agreeing to help on a project or lending
their name to a worthy cause. Of course, people may be unwilling to help on a particular project,
whereas they are willing to help on other projects, so such a standardized measure will not be a
perfect indicator of civic-mindedness. Nevertheless, it is a reasonable operational definition of
this construct, and it has the advantage of being under the control of the researcher.

The Perfect Operational Definition

One must accept that there is no perfect operational definition for a given construct. Each
operational definition will have advantages and disadvantages. A self-report measure is often
quick and easy, but it is subject to presentational biases by the participants who take it. Actual
counts of behavior are less affected by presentational biases, but they are much more time
consuming and often miss critical behavior that is private. Physiological measures can tap some
constructs, but physiological changes occur for many different reasons; therefore, it is hard to
know if observed physiological changes are an indication of the construct of interested.
Laboratory analogues have the advantage of experimental control, but there is always the
question of how closely they relate to real world behavior.
Because no single operational definition is likely to provide the perfect measure of the construct
of interested, it is wise to consider using more than one operational definition in a given
research study. If you randomly select a dozen research studies from the best journals, you may
be surprised to see how often this approach is used. Multiple operational definitions help us to
zero in on the constructs that we are studying, and they often give us insights into the
complexity of those constructs. We already discussed how anxiety researchers now recognize
that the feelings, behavior, and physiology of anxiety are not just alternate ways of tapping
anxiety, but represent distinctly different aspects of anxiety. By recognizing this basic fact, we
can begin to identify how these various aspects of anxiety fit together. This is science at its best-
-a concerted effort at zeroing in on the workings of nature.

Operational definitions

Lecture: Lecture is an oral presentation of information and ideas by a person using visual aids
question and answer to a large group of students and generally in a face to face situation in a
class room.

Small Group Discussion: The practice of meeting group of students and discuss to solve
exiting problem within 6-12 students and find out ways and means to solve it, by using visual
aids.

Learning: It is a development process through which behaviour is changed.

Teaching Method: It is a technique or ways which series of activities are carried out to
communicate idea, information and develop necessary attitudes and skills.

Visual aids: These are the media by which knowledge, information and ideas are communicated
for example; flash card, which helps to enforce learning and related to the diadrrhoea.

Teaching: This usually refers to instruction provided through classroom activities to impart
knowledge.

Mixed method: It is a teaching method, which is combined of lecture and small group
discussion methods.

Pre-test: The test that is administered to the subject before the independent variable is applied
for example; lecture, small group discussion and mixed method.

Post-test: the test that is administered to the subjects after the independent variables for
example; lecture, small group discussion and mixed method are applied is called the post test.

Effectiveness: A change produced in the students in relation to their knowledge on childhood

diarrhoea after systematic intervention of teaching methods, e.g.; lecture, small group
discussion and mixed group.
IT TERMINOLOGIES

access point:
A device that allows wireless-equipped computers and other devices to communicate with a
wired network.
accessibility:
As specified in Section 508 of the 1998 Rehabilitation Act, the process of designing and
developing Web sites and other technology that can be navigated and understood by all people,
including those with visual, hearing, motor, or cognitive impairments. This type of design also
can benefit people with older/slower software and hardware.
ActiveX:
A technology from Microsoft that links desktop applications to the World Wide Web. Using
ActiveX tools, interactive web content can be created. Example: In addition to viewing Word and
Excel documents from within a browser, additional functionality such as animation, credit card
transactions, or spreadsheet calculations.
address:
Identifies the location of an Internet resource. Examples: an e-mail address
(sales@dataprise.com); a web address (http://www.dataprise.com); or an internet address
(192.168.100.1).
alias:
A short, easy to remember name created for use in place of a longer, more complicated name;
commonly used in e-mail applications. Also referred to as a "nickname".
anonymous FTP:
Archive sites where Internet users can log in and download files and programs without a special
username or password. Typically, you enter anonymous as a username and your e-mail
address as a password.
Anti-Spam
To prevent e-mail spam, both end users and administrators of e-mail systems use various anti-
spam techniques. Some of these techniques have been embedded in products, services and
software to ease the burden on users and administrators. No one technique is a complete
solution to the spam problem, and each has trade-offs between incorrectly rejecting legitimate
e-mail vs. not rejecting all spam, and the associated costs in time and effort. Dataprise Cloud-
Based Anti-SPAM e-mail service eliminates the problem almost entirely. Our state-of-the-art
solution lets users see only the e-mail they want — and filters out all of the viruses and e-
solicitations they don’t want before they reach user’s computers and mobile devices. To learn
more click here.
applet:
A program capable of running on any computer regardless of the operating system. Many
applets can be downloaded from various sites on the Internet.
application:
A program designed for a specific purpose, such as word processing or graphic design.
ASCII file:
A file that can be opened and read by standard text editor programs (for example, Notepad or
Simple Text) on almost any type of computer. Also referred to as "plain text files". Examples:
documents saved in ASCII format within word processors like Microsoft Word or WordPerfect;
e-mail messages created by a program like Outlook; or HTML files.
AT command set:
An industry standard set of commands beginning with the letters "AT" that are used to control a
modem. Example: ATDT tells the modem to dial (D) using touch-tone dialing (T). ATDP
specifies pulse dialing (P). Also referred to as the "Hayes Command Set".
 attachment:
In this context, a file that is sent along with an e-mail message. ASCII (plain text) files may be
appended to the message text, but other types of files are encoded and sent separately
(common formats that can be selected include MIME, BinHex, and Uuencode).
authentication:
The process of identifying yourself and the verification that you're who you say you are.
Computers where restricted information is stored may require you to enter your username and
password to gain access.

da·ta·base
/ˈdadəˌbās,ˈdādəˌbās/

Learn to pronounce

noun
1. a structured set of data held in a computer, especially one that is accessible in various ways.
"a database covering nine million workers"

Database sentences example:

 accent correction function, and specialized terms database will help you communicate
with utmost efficiency.
 scheduling information accruals No further accruals of the Coastal Survey -
Wales database are expected.