The Construction of Instruments for Measuring Unemployment

This dissertation contains an analysis of how economists and statisticians built instruments for measuring various concepts of unemployment, and how that process deviated from the normative, dominant theory of measurement in the philosophy of science, the Representational Theory of Measurement. For that purpose, a number of case studies have been conducted where social scientists have tried to build instruments for the measurement of particular concepts of unemployment. These cases show that the Representational Theory of Measurement’s requirement of a strict isomorphism (one-to-one mapping) between phenomenon and data is an idealization. This thesis shows how social scientists gain trust in their numbers through the use of a variety of principles of reliability and additional resources, such as causal relations, regression, correlation, representations of stable mechanisms, diagrams and models, and standardized quantitative rules