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2.2 Informed interviewing is a consequence of the operationalisation of research questions
The concept ‘operationalisation’ is primarily used in quantitative methodology for describing
the design of indicators that measure the variables referred to by an investigation’s hypotheses.
We use it here to describe the process of identifying empirical phenomena we must gather in
order to answer our research question. Thus, operationalisation means (in both cases) translating
a research question into an empirical strategy.
Part of the empirical strategy is to ask scientists about things they know in a language they
can understand. In the case of the project on interdisciplinary collaboration, one of the initial
assumptions was that different types of collaborations are affected by institutions in different
ways. Therefore, the operationalisation of the concept ‘collaboration’ was crucial. To presuppose
a shared meaning of concepts like 'collaboration' is rather dangerous, as becomes clear when we
look at the following statements given by different scientists in the pre-study:
S1: Well, I would call it collaboration if something written comes out of it that is published together.
S2: And there are many colleagues with whom I collaborate without direct results in the form of joint
publications, but we help each other and maintain relations.
S3: H had tried for a long time to isolate a protein and didn’t succeed. Then S. asked E. to give us the recipe.
S4: ... additionally the chemists provide advice, they look at the physicists’ substances.
S5: We agreed that I take a group from his field into the NMR department, that is that I give them the
opportunity to use the equipment.
These descriptions of actions refer to a wide range of collaborative behaviour. Several types of
collaborations can be distinguished such as giving access to research equipment, collaboration
involving a division of labour, service collaborations, and transmission of know-how. A
scientist's understanding of ‘collaboration’ depends on his or her everyday research practices and
the types of collaborations he or she is engaged in.
Concepts like collaboration belong to both sociology's theoretical language and scientists'
everyday descriptions of their actions. This tempts sociologists to pass the sociological question
on to our ‘research objects’, i.e. to the scientists. But if we do so we can’t interpret the answers
without knowing the exact meaning given to the term by each respondent. As the above example
demonstrates, those meanings may widely vary.
For a sufficient operationalisation of the research question about collaborations we had to
refer to the scientific content. Scientists were asked about the content of working relationships to
their colleagues, as in the following example:
Q: You wrote [in your proposal] that relations exist to the scientists A., B., and C.
A: I must say that these relations are purely thematic, there are no practical relations.
Q: What does that mean?
A: That means we have potential relations or similarities regarding the theme and the methodology. We both
investigate membrane proteins that are integrated. ... These are, so to speak, thematic parallels or relations,
similar problems of different systems. But we have no practical collaboration, because the biological systems
are different. Thus, there would be relations by questions and methodology, but there are no collaborations in
the word sense.
Convention