The SAGE Handbook of Measurement

Geoffrey Walford · Eric Tucker · Madhu Viswanathan

Mar 2010 · SAGE

About this ebook

The Sage Handbook of Measurement is a unique methodological resource in which Walford, Viswanathan and Tucker draw together contributions from leading scholars in the social sciences, each of whom has played an important role in advancing the study of measurement over the past 25 years. Each of the contributors offers insights into particular measurement related challenges they have confronted and how they have addressed these.

Each chapter focuses on a different aspect of measurement, so that the handbook as a whole covers the full spectrum of core issues related to design, method and analysis within measurement studies. The book emphasises issues such as indicator generation and modification, the nature and conceptual meaning of measurement error, and the day-to-day processes involved in developing and using measures.

The Handbook covers the full range of disciplines where measurement studies are common: policy studies; education studies; health studies; and business studies.

About the author

Madhu Viswanathan earned Bachelor’s (Mechanical Engineering, IIT, Madras, India, 1985), and doctoral (Marketing, University of Minnesota, 1990) degrees. He joined Loyola Marymount University in August, 2019, after being on the faculty at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, for 29 years. His research programs are on measurement, and subsistence marketplaces, where he has authored several books including Measurement Error and Research Design (Sage, 2005), Enabling Consumer and Entrepreneurial Literacy in Subsistence Marketplaces (Springer, 2008), Subsistence Marketplaces (ebookpartnerships, 2013), and Bottom-Up Enterprise (ebookpartnerships, 2016). He has pioneered the area of subsistence marketplaces, with a bottom-up approach to the intersection of poverty and marketplaces (www.business.illinois.edu/subsistence). He taught courses on research methods, subsistence, and sustainability, educational experiences on the latter, reaching almost a thousand students a year at the University of Illinois, and tens of thousands of students around the world through Coursera. He founded and directs the Marketplace Literacy Project (www.marketplaceliteracy.org), pioneering the design and delivery of marketplace literacy education to subsistence marketplaces. With partners and ongoing programs in India, Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya, Argentina, Honduras, Mexico, and Illinois, approximately 100,000 women have received marketplace literacy education. He has received numerous awards and served on the Livelihoods Advisory Board of UNHCR.