Conceptualisation and Measurement

Self-Assessment Questions1

  1. How should you decide which attributes to include in your conceptualization of a concept during a research project?
  2. Give an example of a systematized concept. State its explicit definition and identify the attributes it contains.
  3. Why should you not be concerned with independent and dependent variables during conceptualization?
  4. Why is it important to ensure validity and reliability within your research?
  5. Give an example of a situation where you would have to do a conceptualization within a conceptualization.

Please stop here and don’t go beyond this point until we have compared notes on your answers.

Assessment

Do you have any questions?

Assessment Guidelines

Assessment Guidelines

The guidelines of the PAIS UG handbook apply to this module. The following regulations replace the corresponding rules in the handbook. All other guidelines in the UG handbook remain unaffected.

  1. Page one of the essay MUST include student ID, essay / dissertation title (exactly as previously submitted), total word count and word count for illustrations (see point 5).
  2. Use font size 11, line spacing 1.5 and justified alignment, in Arial, Times New Roman, or Calibri. If you are using Markdown or LaTeX then the default font CMU is also fine.
  3. Use Harvard style referencing, that is, “(name, date, p./pp. ##)” in the text, plus complete list of references at the end of the essay / dissertation. All references have to appear in the list of references, and all elements in the list of references have to appear at least once in the text. In-text references count towards the word length.
  4. Do not use footnotes for explanatory text. If you do so, these will count towards the word limit.
  5. A page counts as 400 words. Any table or figure counts proportionally with respect to the space it occupies. For example, a table or figure taking up half of a page counts as 200 words. Illustrations should not count for more than 30% of your whole essay / dissertation.
  6. The bibliography and appendix are not included in the word count.
  7. The penalty for exceeding the word limit will be a deduction of 3 marks for every ten percent (or part thereof) over the word limit specified in the assessment information on Moodle. The limit is absolute and there is no percentage leeway.
  8. DOES NOT APPLY TO YOU. THERE IS NO APPENDIX.

The original wording is available here

Referencing

“The aim of a reference is simple: to provide the reader with sufficient information so that the sources that you have cited or quoted can be verified easily. The reader must be able to verify whether you have used or interpreted the source appropriately.”
(PAIS Undergraduate Handbook, Essay Guide. Retrieved 20/10/17.)

References: How?

  • The expectation is that you provide at least ten unique references, and include material beyond the reading list.
  • When should you include references?
    • When you refer to an idea or argument that is not originally yours
    • When you refer to statistics, data, or other claims (‘statements of fact’)
    • When you are quoting someone
  • The PAIS Undergraduate Handbook and the academic skills pages should always be your first port of call for this module.

References: Harvard

You can only use Harvard as referencing system:

  • As Dahl (1989) argues, …

  • The notion of who the people are in a democracy is not clearly defined (Dahl, 1989, p. 2)

    …

Dahl, R. A. (1989). Democracy and its Critics. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Please remember that only in-text citations are permissible for this assessment.

Quotations

Quotation marks indicate the beginning and end of each quotation. Use double quotation marks for this purpose. But if the quotation contains a further quotation within itself, then use single quotation marks to indicate the inner quotation.

Example:

According to Parker (2000, p. 284), “An editorial from the Ontario Women’s Association Newsletter states that ‘There are no women’s issues, they should be called family issues’”.

Long Quotations

Quotations longer than 40 words are called block quotations and deserve special treatment. The quoted passage does not need quotation marks but it should be indented, i.e. the line length should be reduced by about 1cm at both ends.

Bibliography vs. List of References

  • References: Only contains the works cited in the text.
  • Bibliography: Contains the works cited in the text as well asthe sources you have used for background reading without including them in your output

The PAIS UG Handbook refers to it as a bibliography, but has a list of references in mind. You know better now. Please name it “References”.

List of References

  • Does not count towards the word limit
  • Sorted alphabetically by surname of author
  • No bullet points
  • No numbering
  • No creativity

Writing your Assessment

You are [becoming] a professional author. Learn to use the tools of authorship or choose a profession for which you are better suited. (Stimson, n.d.)

I realise that you currently have a lot of things on your plate, such as settling into university life, and writing a very challenging assessment which is due even before reading week of your first term. However, academic writing is one of the many tools which you will have to learn over the course of your degree, and the professional presentation of your intellectual output is one of the many components of academic writing. Unfortunately, MS Word and Apple Pages fail to meet the required standards and so many political scientists (yours truly included) have switched to a program called LaTeX.

To be clear: I have absolutely no expectation that you will use LaTex in the assessment. But using LaTeX will allow you to:

  • submit a beautifully typeset document
  • automate referencing and compilation of the list of references
  • acquire transferable skills for academic writing that will serve you well for all assessments to come, including your dissertation

If you are currently suffering from an overload of information, my advice would be to park this, and come back to it later if you are interested. You will retain access to this Moodle page throughout your studies at Warwick. But if you are intrigued, then please follow me to my “Academic Writing with LaTeX” module. The first two sections of this module will be sufficient for most if not all assessments.

The page also contains an essay template which meets all of the formatting requirements I would like to see in an essay (regardless whether you submit this in MS Word, Pages, or any other format).

Group Work

  • Come together in your conceptual groups
  • Draw one, big tree which contains all your attributes and measurements
  • Prepare to present the results to the seminar

Homework for Week 4

Students as learners:

  • There is no set reading for the Week 4 seminar, BUT:
    • Ensure that you have been reading widely around your concept (i.e. move beyond the sources on Moodle)

Students as researchers:

  • Prepare a list of the reasons which make your concept difficult to conceptualise and measure.
  • Prepare a list of questions you have about the assessment.

  1. Some of the content of this worksheet is taken from Reiche (forthcoming).↩︎