{"id":789,"date":"2011-07-29T08:05:52","date_gmt":"2011-07-29T07:05:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/?p=789"},"modified":"2011-07-29T08:05:52","modified_gmt":"2011-07-29T07:05:52","slug":"playing-tight-and-loose","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/2011\/07\/29\/playing-tight-and-loose\/","title":{"rendered":"Playing Tight and Loose"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>As I noted in an earlier <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/2011\/07\/05\/when-is-esd-not-esd-that-is-the-question\/\">post<\/a>, if you are intent on surveying a university's teaching provision for evidence of the extent, and nature, of how this work focuses on sustainability issues, you are faced with a choice of how tight or loose a conceptual framing to adopt. \u00a0This boils down to whether, and how clearly, you are going to pre-specify what is to count as a focus on sustainability for the purposes of the data collection. \u00a0This has implications for validity.<\/p>\n<p>If you go for a tight specification, you need to use text such as:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\"... by a focus on sustainability, we mean xxxx.\"<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>... and if a loose one, you need to use say something such as:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\"... a focus on sustainability, for example, xxxx.\"<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>What you cannot surely do is to say nothing at all, unless you are content to have very sub-optimal construct validity in whatever emerges, although even this, as I have also noted, can sometimes serve (political) ends. \u00a0I can only hope that the people behind the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thelifeindex.org.uk\/\">LIFE<\/a> index have the courage to go for tight and conceptually meaningful framings when they set out to score universities' teaching focused on sustainability.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As I noted in an earlier post, if you are intent on surveying a university's teaching provision for evidence of the extent, and nature, of how this work focuses on sustainability issues, you are faced with a choice of how...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":237,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-789","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/789","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/237"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=789"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/789\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=789"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=789"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=789"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}