Page 73 - The Importance of Common Metrics for Advacing Social Science Theory and Research

The Importance of Common Metrics for Advancing Social Science Theory and Research: A Workshop Summary
http://www.nap.edu/catalog/13034.html

SOCIAL SCIENCE CONSTRUCTS 61

rate to evaluate health outcomes, a disability rate to evaluate employment
outcomes, and a disability rate to evaluate adherence to the Americans
with Disabilities Act. Bradburn responded that there would be different
measures depending on the purpose, that there may not be one perfect
measure. Michael endorsed the idea of increasing transparency and clarity
by posting a whole range of estimates and letting analysts pick the right
one for their purposes.

MEASURING AND MODELING OF SELF-REGULATION:
IS STANDARDIZATION A REASONABLE GOAL?
Compared with the concepts of poverty and intergenerational mobility,
Rick Hoyle (Duke University) observed, the concept of self-regulation has
no apparent consequences for politics, at least at this point in time. The im-
plications of standardization and the adoption of a common metric would
in this case have far more to do with the accumulation of evidence in the
progress of science than it does for policy. As a social psychologist, Hoyle
had not really considered the likely payoff or the impediments to thinking
about a shared understanding even of how things might be measured. In
fact, the field of social psychology is more likely to place value on origi-
nality and creativity in developing alternative ways to measure concepts.
There is not even a hint of movement that he has discerned to standardize
the measure of self-regulation. Instead, he approached his presentation as a
thought exercise to ask whether there is value to moving toward a common
understanding of the construct and how it should be measured.
Hoyle described self-regulation as a relatively new construct that has
become of increasing interest from both a scientific and a lay perspective,
and it will become increasingly important, for example as an education pol-
icy topic. He dated empirical research on the topic back to the late 1960s,
with the first bona fide theoretical model appearing in 1972. Self-regulation
is primarily a topic of study in social psychology, with applications in
clinical psychology/psychiatry, education, and increasingly other areas that
relate to goal-directed behavior—for example, a general theory of crime,
lack of self-control, health behavior, sport, and delinquency. There has been
a rapid increase in use of the construct, currently accumulating at a rate of
about 120 published articles per year. As evidence has accumulated, social
psychologists have begun to pull together handbooks that summarize the
state of the art, with a total of 114 chapters published in the last 10 years
on the topic of self-regulation.
He attributed the increased interest in part to a number of develop-
ments that exemplify lack of self-regulation: (1) the significant amount of
U.S. consumers’ revolving credit debt, (2) rising obesity rates, and (3) the
recent economic crisis, which is attributable in part to excessive borrowing

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