N.Wells
Posts: 1836 Joined: Oct. 2005
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Quote (GaryGaulin @ Aug. 21 2016,09:34) | Quote (N.Wells @ Aug. 21 2016,06:50) | I think that's too simplistic a view. From ????????????????????? |
Nice find, but your link to it crashed.
The problem with my operational definition is it needs an explanation of the underlying cell (respiration?) cycle that in neural systems leads to a reduction in external awareness, a sleep state. Sleep can be interrupted by waking them, which makes it a less than total loss of consciousness. |
No, that's not what an operational definition is. (It's a theoretical definition, which is nice and important, but that's not an operational definition.) As you have been repeatedly unable to figure this out for yourself, an operational definition explains what to measure and how to measure it (measuring tools and methods, often including units). It is how you identify your variables, and how to measure them. It may contain enough of a regular definition to make it clear what you are measuring, but that's not required. Most fundamentally (and also the point at which you ALWAYS fail), it's how you demonstrate that something exists. It turns the abstract concrete. If you can't explain how to measure something, then self-evidently you don't know what you are talking about.
That's your problem in spades.
Quote | An operational definition is a result of the process of operationalization and is used to define something (e.g. a variable, term, or object) in terms of a process (or set of validation tests) needed to determine its existence, duration, and quantity. |
From http://www.indiana.edu/~p10134....rat.htm : Quote | Mental processes can not be observed directly, because all psychological concepts and labels, like learning, memory, motivation, personality, etc, are inside your mind/brain. Therefore, to study and measure them you need to measure something that reflects these processes. These "stand-ins" for mental processes are called operational definitions.
Operational definitions define concepts and labels by the way they are measured. For example, an operational definition of weight could be: how much a spring stretches when you hang something from it, or how many pennies it takes to balance the weight of something. All psychological concepts and labels, like learning, memory, motivation, personality, etc, are theoretical concepts, which cannot be measured directly.
For example, the operational definition of temperate is how much a column or mercury or red colored alcohol expands in a thin tube put in the thing whose temperature you want to measure. In 1714 Gabriel Fahrenheit defined 0 as the temperature at which a concentrated mixture of salt and water freezes and +96 as the temperature of the human body. In 1741 Anders Celsius defined 0 degrees as the freezing point of pure water and +100 degrees as the boiling point of of pure water at standard ("sea level") pressure, the scale that most of the world outside the US uses.
In contrast, a theoretical definition is based on a theory. When the theory of heat as atomic motion was developed, a theoretically based scale, called the Kelvin scale, was created. The Kelvin scale's 0 degrees is the temperature at which all atomic motion (theoretically) stops. Keeping the step size created by the Celsius scale, the freezing point of water is 273 degrees Kelvin and the boiling point of water is 373 degrees Kelvin. Physics and chemistry have powerful, well-developed theories, so (most) measurement is done using theoretically based scales. Psychology is much less fortunate, and has only a few theoretically based scales. |
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