Question

Then theres the popular spanking the horse, where the human directional puts the advertising sign between his legs, slaps his own behind, and giddy-ups [1].*

Answer 1

Operationalized by one or more indicators like body mass index or tobacco smoking. As another example, in visual processing the presence of a certain object in the environment could be inferred by measuring specific features of the light it reflects. In these examples, the phenomena are difficult to directly observe and measure because they are general abstract as in the example of health or they are latent as in the example of the object.