Tag Archives: operationalization

Picking the 10 coolest American small towns…by Internet poll?

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BudgetTravel.com has highlighted “the coolest small towns in America.” This looked interesting so I clicked on a link to check out the story – and then found that the 10 places were selected by Internet poll. While these may be interesting communities, this does not seem to be a scientific way to go about compiling this list. On the other hand, it may drive more traffic to BudgetTravel as smaller communities and their residents and fans travel to the website to nominate and then vote on the communities.

Also, what qualifies to be nominated as a “cool small town” is interesting:

First, your town must have a population under 10,000—we’re talking small towns, not big cities. It’s also got to be on the upswing, a place that’s beginning to draw attention—and new residents—because of the quality of life, arts and restaurant scene, or proximity to nature. And cool doesn’t mean quaint. We want towns with an edge, so think avant-garde galleries, not country stores.

I wonder how they weed out the “uncool” small towns…

Criteria in the college rating process across publications

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There are numerous publications that rate colleges. According to this story and very helpful graphic in The Chronicle of Higher Education, publications tend not to use the same criteria:

That indicates a lack of agreement among them on what defines quality. Much of the emphasis is on “input measures” such as student selectivity, faculty-student ratio, and retention of freshmen. Except for graduation rates, almost no “outcome measures,” such as whether a student comes out prepared to succeed in the work force, are used.

This suggests each publication is measuring something different as their overall scores have different inputs. This is a classic measurement issue: each publication is operationalizing “college quality” in a different way.

The suggestion about using student outcomes as a criteria is a good one. How much different would the rankings look if this were taken into account? And isn’t this what administrators, faculty, and students are really concerned about? While students and families may worry about the outcome of jobs, I’m sure faculty want to know that their students are learning and maturing.

Measuring happiness

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Forbes has released a list of the world’s happiest countries. The story discusses a few important factors in determining happiness, including income and feeling like one’s psychological and social needs are met on a daily basis.

According to the story, here is how Gallup measured happiness between 2005 and 2009:

First they asked subjects to reflect on their overall satisfaction with their lives, and ranked their answers using a “life evaluation” score between 1 and 10. Then they asked questions about how each subject had felt the previous day. Those answers allowed researchers to score their “daily experiences”–things like whether they felt well-rested, respected, free of pain and intellectually engaged.

It appears Gallup is working with two different dimensions of happiness:

1. Overall life satisfaction. Have you been able to meet your goals?

2. Happiness on a day-to-day basis. Are you relatively free to enjoy life each day?

It is interesting to note that relatively few people in any of the countries are categorized as “suffering.” Additionally, there is not a whole lot of variation in the daily experience index (1-10 scale).