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Chasing the Wind: Assessing Philippine Democracy, Second Edition
basic framework that might guide conscientious morticians in designing their
measures and later analyzing and interpreting the qualitative and quantitative
results of their application (See Table 1, below). It is quite surprising that with
so many studies of democratization across so many years by so many academic
workers, including those that have gained preeminence in their elds, careful
reviews and constructive assessments nevertheless continue to reveal much
work suffering from some of the most basic measurement errors, as in the case
of ordinal data being treated as if they were interval or ratio case.
Table 1. A Framework for the Analysis of Data: Conceptualization,
Measurement and Aggregation (From Munck and Verkuilen, 2002:18)
Spurred at least in part by the largely critical reaction to their attempts at
measuring democracy and its related concerns, academics have actually made
improvements in the quality and rigor of their measures in the past decades.