Week 6: Concept representation: from concepts to measures
What does your measure commit you to?
Design stage: Concept representation. Turn a concept into measures, compare the instruments that produce them, and audit what the measures can be trusted to show.
Prepare for class
Read: Chapter 5; from concepts to measures. The chapters are in Canvas, and the companion page has the materials that go with them.
Reading focus: Distinguish a concept from the rule used to observe it. Follow the chapter’s deductive, inductive, and integrative approaches, and read the marginal-cases problem closely: the cases a pipeline misses are often the ones a social scientist most wants to find.
Write a half-page Practice note on one study from the concept-representation list. Discussion leaders prepare the opening. Submit Milestone 2 and Reflection 1 before Wednesday’s class.
Weekly time budget
Outside class: 360 minutes (6 clock hours) maximum planned work per student. These allocations include all required preparation and submissions; they are planning estimates, not time logs for grading.
| Work | Planned minutes |
|---|---|
| Reading and discussion preparation | 90 |
| Exercises and project work, including troubleshooting | 150 |
| Writing, documentation, and reflection | 120 |
| Total | 360 |
Assemble Milestone 2 from the Chapter 4 deliverables you revised after the review, and write Reflection 1. Read Chapter 5 for one study and one conceptual distinction you can use in discussion.
How the weekly cap works. If required work will exceed the budget, save your attempt and contact the instructor to adjust scope or arrange support.
From the book
Chapter 5’s Practice section gives four dimensions for reading how a study built its measures. Exercise 6.1.1 then starts your own measurement work with a coding-ready corpus and a memo that defends its boundaries.
- Exercise 6.1.1: Building a coding-ready OpenAlex corpus. Required.
The book gives each exercise’s steps. What to submit, and when.
On the companion website: Chapter 5 studies, filtered to concept representation · Chapter 6 materials · Working with text data
Monday, February 15: Practice discussion: concept representation in empirical studies
12:45–2:00 PM · PV A203
After the student-led opening, read the study along Chapter 5’s four dimensions: worldview alignment, measurement approach, featurization and auxiliary instruments, and the evidence for validity and reliability. Ask what the study does when its measure and its theory disagree.
Check the reasoning: Agreement between two coders shows a rule was applied consistently. It does not show that the rule captures the concept. Name the evidence that would.
Wednesday, February 17: Concept workshop
12:45–2:00 PM · PV A203
Write the definition of the concept your project will measure, with at least two categories. Add a clear, an ambiguous, and an excluded example from your own corpus. Begin Exercise 6.1.1: set the boundaries of the coding corpus and draft its memo.
Check the reasoning: Find one document in your corpus that your definition cannot settle. Decide whether the definition needs another rule or the case needs an “insufficient evidence” label.
Work to carry forward
Save the construct definition under kb/concepts/. Finish the corpus memo and freeze the coding corpus so every instrument codes the same documents.
Due this week, at the start of Wednesday’s class:
- Milestone 2: Data management (15 points)
- Reflection 1: data and setup (5 points)
Assignments and deliverables · Your project · The book and companion website