Concept Mapping in Social Research

Concepts refer to properties or characteristics of objects, e.g., weigh, height, attitude, intelligence, and leadership. Concepts are abstract or general ideas, which are important to how we think about particular subjects or issues (Blaxter et al. 2002: 205). They are constructs, i.e., they represent inference deduced from observable events. They symbolize inference at a higher level of abstraction from concrete events and their meaning cannot be easily conveyed pointing to specific objects, individuals or events (Selltiz et al., 1976: Krishnaswami & Ranganathanm, 2005: 92). Concepts are abstractions and represent only certain aspects of reality (Martin, 2004: 24; Young, 2000). PROBLEMS IN CONCEPT USE The use of concepts presents difficulties that are accentuated in a research setting. First, people differ in the meanings they include under any particular table. This problem is so great in normal human communication that we often see cases where people use the same language but do not understand each other. We might all agree to the meaning of such concepts as dog, table, electric light, money, employee, and wife. We may encounter more difficulties, when we communicate concepts such as household, retail transaction, dwelling unit, regular user, debit, and wash sale. Still more challenging are concepts that are familiar but not well understood, such as leadership, motivation, personality, social class, and fiscal policy. For example, personality has been defined in the research literature in more than 400 ways (Hoover, 1991: 21). Although this may seem extreme, writers are not able to express the complexity of the determinants of personality and its attributes (e.g., authoritarianism, risk taking, locus of control, achievement orientation and dogmatism) in a fashion that produces agreement (Saunders et al., 2003). The concepts described represent progressive levels of abstraction-that is, the degree to which the concept does or does not have objective referents. Table is an objective concept in that we can point to tables and we can conjure up in our mind images of tables. An abstraction like personality is much more difficult to visualize. Such abstract concepts are often called constructs.