Validity, Measurement of

What Is Measurement?

We make and use measurements all the time: We measure time with a clock, a stopwatch, or a calendar; we measure distance whenever we drive; we measure weight when we buy products by their weight or whenever we weigh ourselves. Sometimes our measurements are more complicated: At some stores, we learn how much a product costs per pound or per fluid ounce; in these cases, the resulting measure is obtained by division, dividing the overall price by the product’s weight or volume. Similarly, the measurement of density is the mass of a substance divided by its volume.

A measurement may be an even more complex transformation of several measures. For example, although we can crudely measure the distance that we walk by counting our steps and multiplying by the estimated length of our average step, we cannot measure the distance from the Earth to the Moon or measure the distances within atoms the way we measure the distance that we walk. The process of measuring the distance to the Moon or subatomic distances involves several different measures that are combined using a formula.

In communication research and in other social sciences, researchers often measure “human” quantities, such as intelligence (who was smarter, Einstein or Newton?), beliefs (who do you think was taller, George Washington or Abraham Lincoln?), attitudes (who is liked more, Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump?), behaviors (who texts and chats on cell phones more, men or women?), group climate (which college football team has the most fans, Michigan or Ohio State?), organizational structure (are the number of hierarchical levels in a company proportional to the number of employees?), cultural differences (are Americans more religious than Europeans?), as well as personality characteristics (how shy are you?), and aspects of language (how ambiguous is this sentence?). The number of human quantities appears limitless.