How can independent and dependent variables be operationalised in psychology?
You don’t really know what you’re asking, do you? To operationalize a variable is simply to delineate or define it. The independent variable is the cause (in theory), it is the thing that you are changing in the course of the experiment. The dependent variable is the effect (in theory), it is the thing that is dependent upon the independent variable. In order to operationalize these things, you simply have to say what they are, how you’re defining them (and how other have defined them in the past), why you’re examining them, why you’ve chosen the definitions you’ve chosen, and why you think there’s a likely interaction between the two.
