Treatment by Condition Related to pravastatin. Selected from data included with permission and copyrighted by First Databank, Inc. This copyrighted material has been downloaded from a licensed data provider and is not for distribution, expect as may be authorized by the applicable terms of use. CONDITIONS OF USE: The information in this database is intended to supplement, not substitute for, the expertise and judgment of healthcare professionals.
The operational definition of a variable is the specific way in which it is measured in that study. Another study might measure the same conceptual measure differently. If you were studying ways of helping people stop smoking, smoking cessation would be an outcome measure (dependent variable).
The dependent variable is the variable that is being measured in an experiment. For example, in a study looking at how tutoring impacts test scores, the dependent variable would be the participants' test scores. In a psychology experiment, researchers are looking at how changes in the independent variable cause changes in the dependent variable. One way to help identify the dependent variable is to remember that it depends on the independent variable.