I NEED HELP RESPONDING TO THIS POST.

Tanya Paolillo

Happiness Construct - Tanya Paolillo

COLLAPSE

The construct I have chosen to write about is happiness. Two of the four measures of the construct, in general terms, are nominal and ordinal data (A Level Psychology, 2013). Nominal refers to frequency data collected from survey feedback, for example, whereas ordinal data is that which is in rank order.

I found a series of studies involving college students, both young and older adults alike, surveyed related to levels of happiness. This study was conducted globally to provide a fair assessment of the population of interest. One of the questions asked was the daily instances each person thought about happiness (Lyubomirsky & Lepper, 1999). Based on what I have learned thus far about measuring a construct, I believe one of the measures applied to this study reaches the nominal level, as there is one or another answer to the basic question (you either thought about happiness or not) asked of participants (Blackstone, 2018). Furthermore, I think the ordinal level is also applied to research methods used in this series of studies.

The ordinal level of measurement involves ranking measures like social class (Blackstone, 2018). In the college students' study, economic status was an indicator used in the surveys (Lyubomirsky & Lepper, 1999), and we already know the sample population consists of college students. I also believe indexes are being used to aggregate the overall results of the various surveys. Several indicators were incorporated into the study, such as economic status and demographics, as Lyubomirsky & Lepper reported (p. 138). This strengthens the validity of the findings as it provides cross cultural results that were retested several times across space to ensure accuracy and eliminate errors in initial findings.

I would use nominal level of measurement if conducting my own study as the questions are outlined in an unbiased manner and across cultures to identify more well-rounded answers to the questions, which give support to the theory presented by researchers. Alternatively, the data is from 1999, so the data may be considered stale in comparison to more recent studies.

References

A Level Psychology. (2013, October 6). Levels of Measurement. [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arL2qcnQ8y0

Blackstone, A. (2018). Principles of sociological inquiry: Qualitative and quantitative methods. Saylor Foundation (via Open Textbook Library). ISBN 978-1-4533288-9-7.

Lyubomirsky, S. & Lepper, H.S. (1999, Feb.). A Measure of Subjective Happiness: Preliminary Reliability and Construct Validation. Social Indicators Research, 46 (2), 137-155. https://www.jstor.org/stable/27522363