Many core social science concepts are incomplete and require added criteria.

Evidence

Bipolar concepts are often fundamentally incomplete. A core example from the next chapter deals with the World Bank’s conceptualization of poverty using individual or household consumption data. Poverty is conceived of as low levels of consumption. However, consumption by itself runs from low to high as a concept. One must apply additional criteria to consumption to get to the concept of interest, which is poverty. Many social science concepts have this feature. For example, “education” as years of schooling is typically incomplete. The linkage to theories and hypotheses is critical: one does not have hypotheses about education tout court but rather about “educated” or “uneducated.” Similarly, one has hypotheses about democracy, not the bipolar democracy–autocracy. — Gary Goertz, Social Science Concepts and Measurement, 124

Categorization

• XREF: Links to the World Bank’s consumption-based poverty line and to years-of-schooling measures of education.
• SEED: An essay angle: why the World Bank’s poverty concept is only half a concept, since ‘consumption’ alone cannot distinguish poverty from ordinary low spending.