Geoffrey Walford & Eric Tucker 
The SAGE Handbook of Measurement 

The Sage Handbook of Measurement is a unique methodological resource in which Walford, Viswanathan and Tucker draw together contributions from leading scholars in the social sciences, each of whom has played an important role in advancing the study of measurement over the past 25 years. Each of the contributors offers insights into particular measurement related challenges they have confronted and how they have addressed these.

Each chapter focuses on a different aspect of measurement, so that the handbook as a whole covers the full spectrum of core issues related to design, method and analysis within measurement studies. The book emphasises issues such as indicator generation and modification, the nature and conceptual meaning of measurement error, and the day-to-day processes involved in developing and using measures.

The Handbook covers the full range of disciplines where measurement studies are common: policy studies; education studies; health studies; and business studies.

Table of Content

Reflections on Social Measurement: How Social Scientists Generate, Modify, and Validate Indicators and Scales – Eric Tucker, Madhu Viswanathan and Geoffrey Walford

PART ONE: METHODS FOR DATA COLLECTION

Surveys, Tests, and Observational Scales

How to get Valid Answers from Survey Questions: What we Learned from Asking about Sexual Behavior and the Measurement of Sexuality – Aniruddha Das and Edward O Laumann

The SAT : Design Principles and Innovations of a Quintessential American Social Indicator – Howard T Everson

Measurement as Cooperative Communication: What Research Participants Learn from Questionnaires – Norbert Schwarz

Developing Observation Instruments and Arriving at Inter-rater Reliability for a Range of Contexts and Raters: The Early Childhood Environment Rating Scales – Elena Soucacou and Kathy Sylva

Studying Teacher Effectiveness: The Challenges of Developing Valid Measures – Linda Darling-Hammond, Jack Dieckmann, Ed Haertel, Rachel Lotan, Xiaoxia Newton, Sandy Philipose, Eliza Spang, Ewart Thomas, and Peter Williamson

Identifying Consumers′ Compulsive Buying Tendencies: Lessons Learned for Measuring Consumer-related Phenomena – Kent B Monroe, Nancy M Ridgway and Monika Kukar-Kinney

PART TWO: THE CONTEXT OF MEASUREMENT

Comparative, Cultural, Linguistic, and International Dimensions of Measurement

Linguistic Factors in the Assessment of English Language Learners – Jamal Abedi

Measurement Issues in Cross-cultural Research – A Timothy Church

Conceptualizing and Measuring Culture: Problems and solutions – Louis Tay, Sang Eun Woo, Jennifer Klafehn and Chi-yue Chiu

International Comparisons of Educational Attainment: Purposes, Processes, and Problems – David Phillips

Measurement Across Time and Space

Reflections on Measuring Behavior: Time and the Grid – Roger Bakeman

Approaches to Measuring Multi-dimensional Constructs across the Life-course: Operationalizing Depression over the Lifespan – Briana Mezuk and William W Eaton

Description and Discovery in Socio-spatial Analysis: The Case of Space Syntax – Bill Hillier and Noah Raford

PART THREE: FUNDAMENTAL ISSUES IN MEASUREMENT

Minimizing Measurement Error

Understanding the Intangibles of Measurement in the Social Sciences – Madhu Viswanathan

Towards a More Rigorous Scientific Approach to Social Measurement: Considering a Grounded Indicator Approach to Developing Measurement Tools – Eric Tucker

Theorisation of Constructs

Measuring Conceptualizations of Morality: Or How to Invent a Construct and Measure it too – Remo Ostini

The Problem with Poverty: Definition, Measurement and Interpretation – Robert Walker, Mark Tomlinson and Glenn Williams

Critical and Ethical Perspectives

Ethical Issues in Social Measurement – Martin Bulmer and Josephine Ocloo

Measuring is More than Assigning Numbers – Stephen Gorard

Is Social Measurement Possible, and is it Necessary? – Martyn Hammersley

PART FOUR: THE REAL WORLD PRACTICE OF MEASUREMENT

Sensitive Issues and the Difficult to Measure

Sensitive Issues and the Difficulty to Measure: The Case of Measuring Child Sexual Abuse – Will Tucker and Ross Cheit

Indirect Measurement – David J Bartholomew

Improving the Practice of Measurement

Increasing the Measurement Accuracy of Consumption Intentions – Brian Wansink

Making Applied Measurement Effective and Efficient – Ujwal Kayande

Contemporary Challenges of Longitudinal Measurement Using HRS Data – John J Mc Ardle

Measuring the Dimensions of Social Capital in Developing Countries – Veronica Nyhan Jones and Michael Woodcock

Administrative and Secondary Data and Performance Measurement

The Use of Administrative Data to Answer Policy Questions: Secondary Data on Crime and the Problem with Homicide – Marc Riedel

Assessing Performance of School Systems: The Measurement and Assessment Challenges of NCLB – Sean Mulvenon

About the author

Madhu Viswanathan earned Bachelor’s (Mechanical Engineering, IIT, Madras, India, 1985), and doctoral (Marketing, University of Minnesota, 1990) degrees.  He joined Loyola Marymount University in August, 2019, after being on the faculty at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, for 29 years. His research programs are on measurement, and subsistence marketplaces, where he has authored several books including Measurement Error and Research Design (Sage, 2005), Enabling Consumer and Entrepreneurial Literacy in Subsistence Marketplaces (Springer, 2008), Subsistence Marketplaces (ebookpartnerships, 2013), and Bottom-Up Enterprise (ebookpartnerships, 2016).  He has pioneered the area of subsistence marketplaces, with a bottom-up approach to the intersection of poverty and marketplaces (www.business.illinois.edu/subsistence).  He taught courses on research methods, subsistence, and sustainability, educational experiences on the latter, reaching almost a thousand students a year at the University of Illinois, and tens of thousands of students around the world through Coursera.  He founded and directs the Marketplace Literacy Project (www.marketplaceliteracy.org), pioneering the design and delivery of marketplace literacy education to subsistence marketplaces.  With partners and ongoing programs in India, Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya, Argentina, Honduras, Mexico, and Illinois, approximately 100, 000 women have received marketplace literacy education.  He has received numerous awards and served on the Livelihoods Advisory Board of UNHCR.