Social Research Methods: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches

The Need for Measurement
Quantitative and Qualitative
Measurement
The Measurement Process

Reliability and Validity

A Guide to Quantitative Measurement

Scales and Indexes

Conclusion

Qualitative and Quantitative

Measurement

Measurement, in short, is not an end in itself. Its scientific worth can be appreciated

only in an instrumentalist perspective, in which we ask what ends measurement is

intended to serve, what role it is called upon to play in the scientific situation,

what functions it performs in inquiry.

—Abraham Kaplan,The Conduct of Inquiry,p. 171

Who is poor and how much poverty exists? U.S. government officials in the 1960s

answered these questions using the poverty line to measure poverty. New programs were

to provide aid to poor people (for schooling, health care, housing assistance, and so

forth). They began with the idea of being so impoverished that a family was unable to buy

enough food to prevent malnourishment. Studies at the time showed that low-income

people were spending one-third of their income on food. Officials visited grocery stores

and calculated how much low-cost nutritional food for a family would cost and

multiplied the amount by 3 to create a poverty line. Since then, the number has been

adjusted for inflation. When Brady (2003:730) reviewed publications from 1990–2001,

he found that 69.8 percent of poverty studies in the United States used the official

government rate. However, numerous studies found that the official U.S. measure of

poverty has major deficiencies. When the National Research Council examined the

measure in 1995, members declared it outdated and said it should not be retained. The

poverty measure sets an arbitrary income level and “it obscures differences in the extent

of poverty among population groups and across geographic contexts and provides an

inaccurate picture of trends over time” (Brady, 2003:718). It fails to capture the complex

nature of poverty and does not take into account new family situations, new aid

programs, changes in taxes, and new living expenses. Adding to the confusion, we cannot

compare U. S. poverty reduction over time to those in other countries because each

country uses different poverty measures. All of the methodological improvements as to

how we measure poverty would result in counting far more people as being poor, so few

government officials want to change the measure.