Measuring pessimism

For the non-social scientists among you, to operationalize a variable, means to come up with a way to 'measure' a 'concept' for the purposes of conducting empirical tests. Let's say you are interested in studying democracy. How do you define it? And once you've defined it, how do you measure it? Is it 'free and fair elections', or 'civil liberties', or 'presence of certain institutional arrangements'? Well, all of these are valid ways of talking about democracy. Your research question drives the way you decide to measure.

In seminar today, we somehow got around to talking about East European pessimism and American individualism. My colleagues and I were in a goofy mood and before the professor could say OLS-regression, we were already operationalizing 'pessimism' and 'individualism'. For pessimism, we thought that asking 'are you generally happy with the direction the country is going?' or 'do you think this country is a good place to raise kids?' (both being standard social survey questions) are pretty accurate at getting at pessimism. My favorite idea, however, belongs to Ekrem, who suggested that maybe we should look at responses to general administrative questions that are usually asked at the beginning of each interview. For example, how are you feeling today?

That, of course, reminded me of this one time when Clay and I were flipping through a Bulgarian phrase book listing possible responses to the 'How are you? question. The first possible response was 'Gore-dolu' (so and so). And in parentheses, the book explained: Bulgarians are pessimistic.