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GCSE Psychology · key term
Defining a variable precisely in terms of how it is manipulated or measured in a study.
Used by AQA and OCR
Paper 1
Revise: Testable HypothesesOperationalisation means defining a variable precisely in terms of how it is manipulated or measured. Here, the vague idea of alertness becomes a count of correctly identified spelling errors. This makes the prediction testable: the researcher knows which scores to collect and compare.
Paper 1, Paper 2
Defining a variable clearly in terms of how it will be changed or measured in a study.
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Defining variables in terms of how they will be changed or measured is called operationalisation. For example, children could watch either an aggressive or a non-aggressive adult model, and the researcher could count the aggressive acts each child performs afterwards. This turns a broad idea about behaviour into a prediction that can be checked against recorded evidence.
Defining a variable precisely in terms of how it will be manipulated or measured.
