How do other scholars define and measure their concepts?

For this discussion, you will focus on understanding how we define and measure concepts. This is one of the most important pieces of developing research and explanation and you are going to practice. Remember, first you have to provide a general definition of the concept you are going to research. Then you need to operationalize the definition to be more specific, which leads to the final piece of what specific measures you will use to demonstrate/show your concept. Also keep in mind the level of analysis and how that matters when it comes to determining your measures. Here’s an example from my own research.

In my own research, I am interested in researching the policy making process by focusing on how Congress and the president interact with each other on specific policy issues. Part of this is the idea of presidential power –>
Presidential power is my concept -> I define presidential power in general as the ability of the president to assert authority over Congress when it comes to policy making –>
Operational definition of presidential power -> for my research I want to know in what ways the president can assert authority over Congress when it comes to policy making. Clearly the veto is one way, but I am not interested in that at the moment. For this project, I want to see how the president can use unilateral power to ignore Congress when it comes to making policy –>
So my operation definition now focuses on unilateral presidential power -> this is defined as actions the president can take alone to make policy or change policy –>
My measurements of these actions are using Executive Orders as one measurement of unilateral presidential action that can influence Congress in policy making because the president can use Executive Orders to unilaterally change policy without Congress. I am only interested in specific presidents and how they used of executive orders to make policy when they could not get Congress to pass it through the legislative process. Specifically, I want to see what Carter, Reagan, and HW Bush did with executive orders (see how specific?)
There have been nearly 14,000 executive orders issued by presidents since the beginning. What is my unit of analysis?
My unit of analysis is individual, as I only want to look at the 867 Executive Orders issued by those three presidents, which I can then compare to their legislative agenda to see if they issued orders in response to not getting policy made in Congress. It is individual because I will examine and measure each of these individual executive orders for just 3 presidents.
So now I can say that by examining the executive orders issued by Presidents Carter, Reagan, and HW Bush we can measure if they used their unilateral power to ignore Congress when it comes to policy making by using executive orders in place of statute to get what they wanted when Congress would not cooperate with them.
Do you see what I did there and how I did that? For this discussion post, I want you to use the subject of your literature review paper and provide the same analysis of your subject matter as I did here. So what are the concept or concepts you are using for your research project? Provide a general definition for your concept(s). Then provide an operational definition that begins to specify the concept in such a way so that you can measure it. Then provide one or more measures for each concept of your research. Make sure to include the unit of analysis when you get to your measures.

Pro-Tip: remember from the lecture, you can use the literature as a guide. How do other scholars define and measure their concepts? You can use theirs or create your own, or borrow some and create some. Conducting research gives you the opportunity to be in control and decide what it is you want to say and why.