Cartwright and Runhardt (2014) ‘Measurement.’
Citation: Cartwright, Nancy and Runhardt, Rosa (2014) ‘Measurement,’ in Nancy Cartwright, and Eleonora Montuschi (eds.), Philosophy of Social Science: A New Introduction, Oxford: Oxfrod University Press, pp. 265-287.
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Concepts and Definitions: Civil war: Cartwright and Runhardt (2014:266): Sees civil war literature as defining its core object of study as a “war that involves fighting internal to the metropole, the national government participates actively, both sides employ an appreciable amount of force (the ‘effective resistance criterion’, which may require, for example, that the opposition is responsible for at least 5 per cent of deaths, or at least a hundred government deaths), and a certain number of deaths result from the conflict (the ‘death threshold’).”
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Cartwright and Runhardt (2014:265): “Designing proper measures and carrying them out is one of the key jobs we expect science to accomplish.”
Cartwright and Runhardt (2014:265-266): The category to which we assign a phenomenon can have real-world consequences and therefore become the site of political contestation. Cite the case of Syria, where both government and opposition activists deny the conflict is a civil war because it may channel the international response in a direction that neither wants.
Cartwright and Runhardt (2014:266): Note that definitional thresholds can seem arbitrary and that “there is nothing in nature that tells us what a civil war; it’s not a category in the same way that atoms or elm trees are.” They are external measures designed to help us understand phenomena.
Cartwright and Runhardt (2014:266-267): Even if scholars agree on a definition, they then need to agree on how to operationalise the definition to determine whether the criteria have been met.
Cartwright and Runhardt (2014:267): “You may most immediately associate measurement with assigning a number to a specific unit (think, for instance, of measuring someone’s height). But deciding to put an individual unit in a specific category is as much a measurement as assigning them a number or value for some quantity like height or income.” Scientific measurment requires conducting this process in a “systematic and grounded way,” detailing the characteristics of a category, representing the category in our work, and describing the procedure for applying the measure.
Cartwright and Runhardt (2014:268-269): Delineation depends on the purpose of the research: A measure that is good for one aim may not be useful for another. In delineating, we are trying to identify “some shared set of causes or some shared effects from being in the category or possessing specific values of the quantity.”
Cartwright and Runhardt (2014:269-270): Note that categorization can “go wrong” when we draw the boundaries too broadly and therefore render causes invisible. As an example, cite research showing that a broad definition of civil war shows ethnic diversity is not, statistically speaking, a cause of conflict; however, when a narrower category of ethnic civil war is used, diversity is an important factor. Scholars can also disagree not in substance, but because they employ different definitions and are therefore measuring different things. [This applies to ideology]
Cartwright and Runhardt (2014:271): Binary (present or not) representations of civil war imply that one civil war is the same as another.
Cartwright and Runhardt (2014:281-282): See values influence science in several ways. Firstly, in deciding to study a topic, we are attributing a non-objective value (e.g. reflecting personal interest or prior knowledge) to it as worth of study. Second, we may use information to make direct policy recommendations. Third, the decision to publish or not requires a value judgement about the acceptability of potential of the potential implications and consequences of our findings.