Do you need to operationalize your variables?
You need to operationalize your variables by explicitly indicating how you plan to measure your study variables. This is operationalizing is important especially if your variables are not directly measured. Some concepts need to be measured indirectly and therefore you need to clearly indicate how you will measure these variables in the study.
Example,
Let’s say your hypothesis says that people who suffer obesity tend to be more aggressive. Now, you have two variables: obesity and aggression.
How do you measure these two variables?
Obesity can be measured by the total weight of a person. What about aggression? The concept of aggression is not easy to measure so you have to find a way to operationalize this variable. If you look up the literature, you may find an aggression scale. The aggression scale maybe 5 survey questions that ask about a person’s willingness to fight, tease or confront others. These questions would specifically measure your variable and make it operational.
You will need to check the literature and see how other researchers have measured or operationalize variables. You may find several scales that may fit your research. You may have to make your own scale to operationalize your variable. If you make it yourself, you may want to check its validity and reliability by running a pilot study.
Pilot Study to assure validity
Why do you do a pilot study? You do it in order to make sure that your methodology will generate the desired results. It is reliability and validity check for your research method. You do not want to conduct your research method on your entire sample, and then achieve results contrary to what you wanted.
For example, you have developed a survey that no one else has tested before to achieve a specific objective. You are planning to run the survey over hundreds of participants. You may want to run this survey on a small number of participants in a pilot study.
In the pilot study, you basically conduct a qualitative mini research. You will be giving your survey to a few individuals who will answer the survey. Then you may sit with these participants, and make sure that they understood the survey questions correctly. Then, you will make sure that the way they answer the survey questions is exactly how the questions are intended to be answered.
During the pilot study, there is a good chance that you will better understand your topic. You may realize that you need to remove, modify, or add a question. You may want to re-word the questions so that it implies the intended purpose of the question. Alternatively, you may realize you want to go one step backward to achieve your purpose.
A pilot study is needed every time you do not have enough evidence that your questions have been tested. If you have translated questions from another language, then you need to test the translation. If you have modified an existing survey, you want to make sure it holds the same level of validity. If you have developed your own questions, you want to make sure they are valid and can achieve their desired results.
During the pilot study, you will get a mini result of your research. These mini results provide you with sample data of your final results. It is a good idea for you to try the analysis you have planned to make sure you know how it will turn out.
Test how you operationalize variables
The pilot study is an important step to make sure you operationalize study variables effectively. For example, if you feel the results of the survey items shows that the person was aggressive, while in fact, he was not. Then maybe the concept of aggression was not properly operationalized.