so in the last video we were talking about the idea of a conceptual definition just meaning when we go to design our study once we have our hypothesis in hand and we know what variables we're going to look at in our study we have to give a clear definition of those variables tell the reader tell other scientists what is it we mean when we say something like intelligence what characteristics set in our view set intelligence off from other variables um maybe how are those characteristics related and usually by the way that is not just your opinion but you're backing that up with past research and with solid logical wellth thought out reasoning uh even so that doesn't mean that your definition is foolproof but as long as you're being clear about it people can at least decide for themselves whether they agree or disagree they can take your work they can revise your definition they can build on it and refine it and so on uh once you have this conceptual definition you've only just started because the next thing you have to think about is specifically how am I going to measure this thing so I want to know if certain people in my study have higher or lower intelligence how am I actually going to assess that how am I actually going to put some kind of a number on it that is a is a huge task to decide what is the best way to do that or the best way to answer the question that you are trying to answer so this is not something where there's always one best way to measure something but in your particular case with the kind of thing you want to know what is a good way of measuring that that will give you the sort of information you need so what we do when we're approaching this is we take our conceptual definition and we ask what measurable effect would this variable have on the world or in this case it may have many different effects so for example uh in in our idea our conceptual definition of intelligence that we've come up with here and again this isn't anything that is based on Research this is just for the sake of examples so this could be a totally incorrect view of what intelligence is but just to go with example we've said that we consider uh the ability to solve problems to be an important characteristic that is part of our definition of intelligence what we're going to do is see in what way do we think this characteristic would have an actual impact a measurable effect on the world and of course there's all kinds of ways in which it could have a measurable impact on the world we could uh bring people into our study and we could give them more word problems and by the way this is this is not even nearly as specific as we would need to get in discussing how we're going to measure this so we're going to give them some word problems and see how well they do solving the word problems well are the word problems uh written down on paper or are they read to them out loud uh are they you know what language are they in what level of vocabulary do they use all kinds of details uh that we would need to consider and need to relate to does this actually get at what we mean by intelligence and and the point behind all this is we're trying to find some way uh some kind of effect that when we see that effect that means we are detecting intelligence we're detecting the variable that we're trying to measure um uh word problems would be one example we could also uh give the person some kind of a physical physical puzzle and again even that is being too General we should really be specific in what we're what we're talking about and we can measure how you know maybe the time that it takes them to solve uh this particular type of physical puzzle is a good measure we've decided of their ability to solve problems and we believe that is at least in part an indication of intelligence when we are taking our conceptual definition and we're trying to see the effects that it would have on the world the measurable effects it would have this process this is called operationalizing operationalizing and the reason it's called that it's kind of a confusing name but it's called operationalizing because we are seeing what operations or procedures or techniques we can take to actually detect to measure the variable that we're trying to study and uh a very common term that you'll see is the idea of uh I'll put it down here where I have a little more space of an operational definition and that's just the result of this operationalizing uh task that we take that we carry out so we take our conceptual definition we operationalize it in the sense of saying what what are the actual operations or procedures techniques that we need to do to measure the effects that this variable has on the world and that is our operational definition in other words another way of saying that is an operational definition it is a definition of a variable especially a construct where we can't see uh directly measure all of the variable we have to sort of direct or we have to sort of indirectly measure it by seeing its effects on the world but it's a definition of a variable in terms of how that variable will be measured and that is the key word in this definition measurement operational definitions are all about measurement we maybe would have been better off calling the measurement definitions but the again the reason why we're calling them operational definitions is because uh we are coming up with what operations tasks can we carry out to take the measurement to make the measurement of our variable so just to be clear here right the idea is we've said here's our definition of intelligence we think there's this thing out there we can't directly measure it or we can't directly measure all of its characteristics but we've come up with this construct uh we we've defined the construct by conceptually by by listing different characteristics and we have some idea of how those characteristics are related how they're going to vary together they're going to co-vary now we're going to move into the realm of trying to detect the effects they have on the world and quantify them turn them into actual numbers and that is what creating this operational definition is all about and we'll go over some examples of operational definitions but the idea is we're we're trying to get very specific so we're going to say things like we measured intelligence by the amount of time in seconds that it took someone to solve this particular type of word problem uh we're going to measure happiness um we'll give you our conceptual definition of happiness but but once we've done that we're going to give the operational definition by saying something like we uh define happiness here as as the number of times per minute that a person Smiles so we are change we are taking our conceptual definition and we are transforming it or translating it into concrete terms of how we're actually going to go about measuring the thing what techniques are we going to use what operations are we going to use and that is why we call it an operational definition