Suppose you are given the following question as a research topic:
Are women more emotional than men?
a. How would you conceptualize, operationalize, and measure it?
(Make sure to include your hypothesis)
b. Is “crying” a valid measurement of being emotional? Why or why not?
In order to find out if women are more emotional than men, we would have to choose a less subjective way to measure emotions. I would start by conceptualizing two emotions like anger and sadness. Anger is shown by humans in several ways including sweating, raised voice, increased heart rate, furrowed eyebrows, and sometimes audible cursing. The other emotion we could look at is a sadness which is defined by teary eyes and crying. To operationalize this, each subject would have a similar background, age, and education. show each sex two different videos and monitor them. The first video would be angering, and the second video would be sad. However, each video could be perceived either way. In order to monitor anger, we would show a video of an animal being abused and pay close attention to their vital signs and look for an increase in heart rate and blood pressure. We could also monitor body language including sweating and facial expressions. We could also ask each participant how they felt because they are the only ones who truly know how they felt. I would operationalize it by using heart rate and a blood pressure monitor while also paying close attention to body language. There would also be a survey after each video. This would be considered Qualitative research because we would allow “more interpretation and nuance in what people say and do”(pg 56) We would have to keep in mind the Hawthorne effect and assume some reactions are exaggerated. Get Social Science help today
