Do They Measure What You Think? (2024)

FAQs

Are we measuring what we think we are measuring? ›

We never measure what we think we are measuring because there are always confounders, all the time. We can't control for the confounders because in practice we never know what they are, or which potential confounders actually matter, or which confounders are upstream vs downstream.

Peter Drucker is often (and mistakenly) given credit for the phrase “What gets measured, gets managed.” While that is in itself a flawed statement, the converse is actually more often the case: What doesn't get measured, doesn't get managed.

EEG measures can be used as indicators of mental processes (such as perception of an image) or states (such as alertness) and can help diagnose conditions such as epilepsy or a sleep disorder. The record of brain activity produced by EEG is called the electroencephalogram.

Time, size, distance, speed, direction, weight, volume, temperature, pressure, force, sound, light, energy—these are among the physical properties for which humans have developed accurate measures, without which we could not live our normal daily lives. Measurement permeates every aspect of human life.

IQ measures intelligence based on a person's ability to reason using logic. Intelligence testing asks participants questions that tests their memory, pattern recognition, and problem-solving capabilities. The test also takes time into account, looking at how long it takes a participant to complete the test.

The official sources of time currently rely on cesium atoms. The best of these clocks is accurate to within one three hundred millionths of a second per year. For perspective, your quartz wristwatch may be accurate to within about 15 seconds per month.

For the most part, however, scientists measure human brain activity en masse. They do it non-invasively using tools such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). “These tools aren't sensitive enough to record the activity of a single neuron,” says Jennings. “It's more like an airplane view of traffic.

A ToM measure constructed with developmental ToM components can help researchers to probe the divergence of developmental mechanisms in typically developing children and children with ToM difficulties.

Measuring Consciousness Using fMRI Imaging

We often are not consciously aware of when we switch from one brainwave pattern to another, but there are measurable changes in the brain that occur that can be shown using EEG measurements and fMRI brain imaging.

The seven base units were chosen for historical reasons, and were, by convention, regarded as dimensionally independent: the metre, the kilogram, the second, the ampere, the kelvin, the mole, and the candela.

What are a person's measurements? ›

In human body measurement, these three sizes are the circumferences of the bust, waist and hips; usually rendered as xx–yy–zz in inches, or centimeters.

Accurate results are both reliable and valid. Reliability means that the results obtained are consistent. Validity is the degree to which the researcher actually measures what he or she is trying to measure.

Validity in scientific investigation means measuring what you claim to be measuring. This is about the validity of results within, or internal to, a study.

Validity , often called construct validity, refers to the extent to which a measure adequately represents the underlying construct that it is supposed to measure.

Validity: Validity refers to the extent we are measuring what we hope to measure (and what we think we are measuring).