Operationalization of Social Science Concepts by Intuition

Much has been written about the effects of the wording of survey questions onresponses, whereas, relatively little attention has been given to the content of thequestions or the translation of theoretical concepts into related questions in surveyresearch.In this paper we concentrate on the link between a set of basic concepts for socialscience research and questions that can be formulated to measure these concepts.These basic concepts are: evaluations, cognitive judgments, relations, evaluativebeliefs, feelings, preferences, rights, norms , policies, action tendencies, expectations,behavior, events, knowledge, demographic characteristics and information about place,time and procedures.In order to clarify the link between the concepts and their verbal expressions(assertions) we analyze structures of sentences presenting the different concepts.Eight principally different assertion structures have been found which describemost of the survey concepts.These findings can be used in two ways: one can use them to specify an assertionfor a certain type of concept or alternatively one can also use the system to classifyexisting questions.