Chapter 4: Concepts, Operationalization, and Measurement – Flashcards
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Professor Smith is studying attitudes toward gun control and plans to assess support for firearms registration by determining whether or not her research subjects say they would travel to countries where the possession of unlicensed guns is legal. Her critics argue that this measure lacks______
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Face Validity
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The age of an offender is an example of which level of measurement
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ratio
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Reliability is measuring what you think you are measuring
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False
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Which of the variables allows for attributes to be placed on a continuum with equal distance between points?
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Interval and ratio
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Every variable should have two important qualities: their attributes should be exhaustive as well as mutually exclusive
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True
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The UCR accounts for all types of crime, even those crimes that are not observed
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False
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What two qualities should every variable possess
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exhaustive and mutually exclusive
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Validity refers to the degree to which a measure covers a single range of meanings included within the concept
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False
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Logical sets of attributes are known as
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variables
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Ranks in the local police department represent what level of measurement
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ordinal
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An empirical measure that adequately reflects the meaning of the concept under consideration is known as
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validity
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Sometimes it is necessary to make the same measurement more than once. This is known as ____
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test-retest method
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When a supervisor for a survey telephones a subset of the respondents to verify certain information, it is an example of
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interrater reliability
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The production report generated at the city police department contains the number of arrests made by each officer on a monthly basis. What level of measurement would number of arrests be
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Ratio
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What type of variable allows you to arrange attributes from greater than to less than, but does not allow you to tell how much greater or how much less than one attribute is from another?
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ordinal
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When including an item on a questionnaire that asks about marijuana use in the following way: never used, used 1-5 times, used 6-10 times, used more than ten times, this would be an example of what type of variable
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ordinal
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Criterion-related validity refers to
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a comparison of measures to some external criterion
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Validity that is related to the logical relationships between variables is known as
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Construct validity
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Which of the following are referred to as summary based measure of crime
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UCR
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The test-retest method is used to examine
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reliability
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Concepts are
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mental images
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A ___ asks people whether or not they have been the victim of a crime
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victim survey
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The primary difference between the interval and the ratio level of variables is that____
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ratio level is on a true zero point while interval level is not
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Delinquency, victimless crimes, and crimes rarely observed may be measured by self report studies
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True
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Construct validity refers to
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the basis of logical relationships among variables
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If a researcher is concerned with whether a particular measurement technique will, after repeated measures, yield the same results, they are concerned with
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reliability
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Which is accounted for by the NCVS
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national sample of households
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The words or symbols in language used to illustrate subjective thoughts or mental images about things we may encounter in daily life are known as
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concepts
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An indicator of the "dimension harm" is
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physical injury
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Particular empirical measures may or may not agree with common understandings of our individual mental images about a specific concept. This is known as
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face validity
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Ordinal measures are variables whose attributes may be logically rank-ordered
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true
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The NCVS is based on a nationally representative sample of
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households
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Conceptualization is the process by which we specify precisely what we mean when we use particular terms
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True
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NIBRS reports each crime incident rather than the total number of certain crimes
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true
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The most effective method of accounting for certain crimes, such as delinquency and victimless crimes are
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Self report surveys
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What are two important things achieved by the specification of conceptual definitions
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it serves as a specific working definition a researcher presents so that readers will understand exactly what is meant by a concept; it focuses our observational strategy
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Crimes must at a minimum have an offender, because without an offender there is no crime
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true
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A single incident cannot include multiple offenses, but may have one offense and musltiple offenders
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False
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The assignment of grades by the professor to major research papers is an example of
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measurement
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A specifiable aspect of a given concept is referred to as a
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dimension
