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How much value can you place on measurement reporting in the social and medical sciences is a subject explored by �²ʿ��� Fellow .

Cristian has a background in Economics and a PhD in History and Philosophy of Science. His research focuses on three main areas: quantitative measurement; methods for causal inference; and the role that moral/political values play in science. 

He says: “In the social and medical science disciplines we observe difficult debates, debates about method, about objectivity, and politics, and sometimes their results are deeply doubted, yet they are also of critical importance for social policy. This makes research on them particularly interesting and&�Բ�����;������𱹲��Գ�.”

Research on measurement was the focus of Cristian’s PhD and is the subject of his four-year Research Fellowship at Caius.

“One big debate, going on now for decades, between social scientists and methodologists is whether the results of some typically used measures in psychology, sociology, and medicine can be considered quantitative or merely ordinal,” he says.

An example is a life satisfaction survey, with a satisfaction scale that goes from 0 to 10.

“Asking this question to people produces numbers, just like measuring the length of objects with a ruler produces numbers,” Cristian adds. “But are these numbers just like the numbers of a ruler? On an actual ruler, the distance between the 1cm and 2cm mark is the same as the distance between 5cm and 6cm. Is the life satisfaction question like a ruler in this sense, can we trust that the various increments in life satisfaction are the same? 

“This apparently simple question raises several puzzles, puzzles about what quantities are, how do we know when an attribute is quantitative or not, are the quantities that appear in social science truly quantitative in the same way as length or mass are and, if they are, do the current methods for measuring in the social sciences actually deliver quantitative information? These are all important questions for the philosophy of science. But they are also of huge social relevance.” 

For example, Cristian says, some prominent economists have recommended evaluating social policies using responses to life satisfaction surveys.

He adds: “The current dominant conceptual framework for thinking about measurements assumes that measurements are either ordinal or quantitative, but there are no other options in between. So, either life satisfaction scales numbers are just like those of the ruler, or they are just like those of a ranking. If it is the latter, then the economists’ proposal is methodologically problematic, because one should not make average comparisons with numbers that were merely meant to rank. Averages comparisons require quantitative measurement.”

Cristian challenged this conceptual framework in his doctoral thesis, showing it is problematic to assume that measurement is either ordinal or quantitative with nothing in between.

He adds: “How should we think of them so that we can say that they have quantitative structure, that is that they have increments that are all of the same kind? These are the guiding questions of my future research project, and the working hypothesis is that there is more than one answer to this question.

“During the research fellowship, I aim to dig deep into questions about quantitativeness and measurement in the human sciences, and to do so is to work on topics that are relevant for my discipline as well as for policy debates that go well beyond academic interests.”

Cristian is enjoying the interdisciplinary nature of Caius, with fruitful discussions often over lunch.

“The collegiate system promotes interdisciplinarity because all the disciplines get together and that's exactly the kind of atmosphere where very interesting philosophical discussions can take place,” he says.

“The kind of conversations that I've had with many of my colleagues in the Fellowship are precisely of the kind that gives us ideas as philosophers of science, or allow us to test the ideas that we have.”