Page 79 - 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
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SOCIAL SCIENCE CONSTRUCTS 67

on some sort of conceptual sliding scale. There seems to be a gradation in
the level of social articulation at which a concept, construct, or ontology
develops. She questioned if different conceptual unpacking could be em-
ployed to avoid using one word across very different kinds of domains of
the social sciences and their relationship to policy. One might also think of
standardization as potentially a form of social production or reproduction
that relates to the evolution of the construct itself.
Grusky said that it is important to know how a particular construct is
being used in public discourse (e.g., social mobility) and the way in which
the science itself has proceeded. For social mobility, the field has recog-
nized that the concept is best understood in a more disaggregated form.
He believes it is possible to demand precision in the scientific context by
recognizing that there are quite distinct and important types of mobility,
all of which should be monitored simultaneously and operationalized in a
credible way and also combined into a single model in order to tease out
the relationships among different types.
Robert Pollak commented on the idea of deconstructing concepts into
more distinguishable pieces. For example, he found it interesting to consider
two distinct concepts inherent in self-regulation—self-regulation of atten-
tion and self-regulation of behavior—that might be measured separately.
He cautioned against standardization if it means imposing a unitary or dual
construction from the outside in a bureaucratic way. In Grusky’s view, stan-
dardization may be seen as a kind of correct representation of the simulta-
neous consideration of constructs and measures that are now independent.
Turning to the notion of intergenerational mobility, Pollak observed
that much of the early literature on intergenerational mobility assumed
that people were raised in two-parent families, and the main focus was on
transmission from fathers to sons. This formulation is no longer appropri-
ate in the context of changing family structures, for example the growing
prevalence of female-headed families, nonmarital fertility, and the effects of
immigration. Grusky agreed with Pollak on the importance of factoring in
mother’s income and occupation; ignoring mother’s occupation will result
in profound misunderstanding about the direction of the trend in intergen-
erational mobility in the family.
Pollak also remarked that although there is no standardization between
economics and sociology, the collection of data essentially involves choices
about which questions to ask. In collecting income and occupational data,
there is no requirement that the users of the data must focus on the occu-
pations piece or the earnings piece. Agreeing on the type of data to collect
could be another way of promoting common metrics.
Robert Hauser returned to the issue of self-regulation. He stated that
the economists’ original notion of ability in human capital was a very global
concept: whatever was left over in the psychology of individuals. The ar-

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