
Study: Developing and Testing a Scale to Measure Need for Drama - randomname2
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886915006327
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mansilladev
I pictured a man, standing on a physical scale, with an analog arrow indicator
swaying back and forth, gradually settling on the bold black words: NO DRAMA

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msellout
Can't read the full article for free, but I expect their measurement
techniques are tautological. It's the reification fallacy -- create a
measurement, redefine the term as that measurement, then conflate the
measurement with the original meaning of the term.

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closed
To be sure, there are two steps in their process: convince you their
assessment is a valid reflection of the construct (term) of interest, and then
examine different properties of the assessment (e.g. how reliable are a
person's responses to this assessment). The convince you part is why it is not
necessarily the reification fallacy.

For example, suppose I create a measure of sadness that is the sole question:
are you sad?. Does it seem like a good measure of the term sadness to you? If
you think it's a bad measure,then I haven't convinced you, and we need to
rethink a more convincing assessment, but it doesn't mean that if I use that
question to operationalize (serve as my behavioral definition for) sadness
that I committed the reification fallacy. Instead, you've failed to recognize
that I'm using an argument of the form, "if you believe this is a good
behavioral definition of sadness, then...".

If you could ever see yourself using a statment like "that person is sad",
then there are probably observables I could use to do research based on what
sadness means to you. That's basically the logic these and many researchers in
psychology / neuroscience are taking.

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mdisc
Ah, this seems very interesting, but I am sadly not sure I would pay $35.95
for access.

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dnissley
Full Article: [http://scottbarrykaufman.com/wp-
content/uploads/2016/01/Fran...](http://scottbarrykaufman.com/wp-
content/uploads/2016/01/Frankowski-et-al.-2016.pdf)

