A numeric measure should mirror the structure of its concept.

Evidence

When designing numeric measures one needs to be concerned about how faithful the measure is to its theory (i.e., concept). The degree of faithfulness is what I call “concept-measure consistency.” This is the degree to which the numeric measure reflects well the basic structure of the concept. While there are a variety of aspects to this consistency, I will focus on the degree to which the structure of the measure matches well the structure of the concept. Structure, as I outlined it in chapter 2, is basically defined in terms of the levels of the concept and how indicators or secondary-level dimensions are “aggregated”—to use the appropriate word in the context of measure construction—to produce the next higher level. — Gary Goertz, Social Science Concepts, 620

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces ‘concept-measure consistency’ — the degree to which a measure’s aggregation structure reproduces the concept’s level structure.
• SEED: Angle: the aggregation-mismatch problem — how collapsing a multidimensional concept into one index quietly commits a causal claim.