Algorithm of Designing a Social Survey Research on Pessimism about the Future
Channel: Hamed Hosseini
Date: 2021-07-28

Download the associated document from here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/353363421_Designing_a_Social_Survey_Research_on_Social_PessimismOptimism_An_Algorithmic_Layout_for_Teaching_Purposes 

Imagine we want to explore how optimistic/pessimist a group of people (university students for example) are about their future and what makes them more or less optimistic. This implies a question that guides our research, i.e., a Research Question. Most social inquiries aim to answer one or a few interrelated research questions. One way to answer this question, if especially we are dealing with a large group of people, is to use a quantitative research strategy. This means we need to 'measure' subjects' level of optimism like when we measure their heights or weights! (it can't be that accurate, but it will be revealing enough; we should still be to order responses from high to low) So, we need to first define what pessimism/optimism means. Our definition will most likely be an abstract one (like many other concepts in social sciences). The literature can help us develop a good definition most of the time. We may simply adopt someone's definition if we find it good enough. But an abstract definition needs to be made more concrete in a way that it would help us differentiate between a rather optimistic person and a rather pessimistic one. Let's say "optimism is about having a vision of life or living conditions in the future that is better than now". Pessimism would be the opposite. This sounds abstract! Right? We still cannot measure peoples' optimism/pessimism by using this definition, like the way we measure people's height (knowing what height means cannot be used to measure people's height either!). So, we need to create a measurement/research tool; something that when people react to would give us a unique number that represents their level of optimism/pessimism. This is called the operationalization of concepts into indicators. An indicator is a measurable version of an abstract concept. ...