What is it about?
This essay -- it is not a research paper -- provides examples, drawn from my experiences, of the benefits and costs of standardized measures in the social and economic sciences.
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Why is it important?
Standardization of measurement -- both for scientific and policy purposes -- has benefits and costs that should be weighed carefully when research is designed and carried out and when such measurements are used to guide policy.
Perspectives
I wrote the first draft of this essay for a 2010 workshop on comparability in measurement at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and, then, revised and expanded it for delivery as the 2011 Otis Dudley Duncan memorial lecture at meetings of the American Sociological Association. For a variety of reasons, I never submitted it for publication until Yu Xie invited me to do so late in 2015. It is both a personal testimony of my exposure to an array of social and economic measures and, I hope, a series of lessons that may be useful to others.
Dr Robert M Hauser
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Comparable metrics: Some examples, Chinese Journal of Sociology, January 2016, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/2057150x15624896.
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