Designing Objective Measures

Many variables of interest to psychologist involve feelings or internal experiences, such as anxiety, hunger, or frustration. It is tempting to rely on self-report for many of these variables. For example, we could ask people to rate how anxious they feel. However, self-reports often have problems. People may distort their reports, because they are embarrassed by their feelings. People who have little awareness of particular feelings may not be able to reliably report the level of those feelings. Finally, young children and animals cannot report their feelings, thus preventing us from studying the phenomena in them unless we have other measures available.

Brainstorming Objective Measures

For each of the following variables, identify as many objective measures of them as possible. Remember, objective measures involve the direct measurement of behavior. The behaviors should be clear and specific so that two raters would have little difficulty agreeing that the behavior did or did not occur.

anxiety level in people who are afraid of enclosed spaces
hunger in adults on a diet
hunger in children
hunger in rats
a parent's love for his or her young infant
racial prejudice
degree of embarrassment
anger level
degree of sexual arousal
student's attitudes toward their teachers

Checking Out Your Measures

You may find it interesting to quickly check out how many of your objective measures, or variations on them, have been used in the research literature. This is rather easy if you have access to computer data bases, such as PsycINFO. There is a tutorial on how to search such data bases included on this website. The abstracts are often sufficient to tell you how variables were operationalized, although sometimes you will need to read the article to get the details.