The Structure of Objectivist Studies - Evaluation Methods in Biomedical Informatics - page 88

If the original measurements are made with the practice as the object class,
information about individual patients cannot later be retrieved or analyzed.
Attribute
An attribute is a specific characteristic of the object: what is being mea-
sured. Information resource speed, blood pressure, the correct diagnosis (of
a clinical case), the number of new patient admissions per day, the number
of kilobases (in a strand of DNA), and computer literacy are examples of
pertinent attributes within biomedical informatics. Whereas some attributes
are physical properties of objects, others are abstractions invented by
researchers specifically for conducting investigations. For this reason, attrib-
utes are sometimes referred to as “constructs.” Over time, each scientific
field develops a set of attributes, “things worth measuring,” that become
part of the culture of that field. Researchers may tend to view the attrib-
utes that are part of their field's research tradition as a routine part of the
landscape and fail to recognize that, at some earlier point in history, these
concepts were unknown. Blood pressure, for example, had no meaning to
humankind until circulation was understood. Computer literacy is a more
recent construct stimulated by contemporary technological developments.
Indeed, the most creative works of science propose completely new con-
structs, develop methods to measure them, and subsequently demonstrate
their value in describing or predicting phenomena of interest.
Many studies in informatics address human behavior and the beliefs that
are presumed to motivate this behavior. In such studies, the attributes of
interest are usually not physical or physiological properties, but, rather,
abstract concepts corresponding to presumed states of mind. Attitudes,
knowledge, and performance are broad classes of human attributes that
often interest biomedical informatics researchers. The behavioral, social,
and decision sciences have contributed specific methods that enable us to
measure such attributes.
Attribute-Object Class Pairs
Having defined an attribute as a quality of a specific object that is a member
of a class, it is always possible to view a measurement process in terms of
paired attributes and object classes. Table 4.1 illustrates this pairing of
attributes and object classes for the examples discussed above. It is impor-
tant to be able to analyze any given measurement situation by identifying
the pertinent attribute and object class. To do this, certain questions might
be asked. To identify the attribute , the questions might be: What is being
measured? What will the result of the measurement be called? To identify
the object class , the question might be: On whom or on what is the mea-
surement made? The reader can use Self-Test 4.1, and the worked example
preceding it, to test his or her understanding of these concepts.