Terminology in sociology & statistics
What is the word commonly used in statistics when the thing that you want to measure cannot be (or was not) measured directly, so you assume that another thing that can be (or was) measured gives an estimate of the frequency of the thing that you want to measure?
For a (silly) example: You are interested in knowing how many Roman Catholics were in the survey but that question was not asked. Number of children in family was asked, so you use that figure as a (silly, I know) basis for inferring RC status, say when x>4.
I am pretty sure there is a term of art for this, something like token, substitute, stand-in, but can’t seem to recall it.
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This is really @Amadeus 's answer (so I'll delete this if s/he posts under his/her own account), but I didn't want it to be lost in a comment:
I'd call it a "proxy", often computed or logically inferred. 2nd Definition at Link below, reads "A figure that can be used to represent the value of something in a calculation. ‘the use of a US wealth measure as a proxy for the true worldwide measure’" en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/proxy – Amadeus Mar 3 at 22:54
Operationalization.
"operationalization is a process of defining the measurement of a phenomenon that is not directly measurable, though its existence is inferred by other phenomena. Operationalization thus defines a fuzzy concept so as to make it clearly distinguishable, measurable, and understandable by empirical observation."
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operationalization
"How" you measure a thing is how your study is operationalized. E.g. how "liking ice-cream" turns into a categorizable dataset.
Some of these other terms, like direct and indirect measurement don't really apply in the social sciences, because we're not dealing with physical objects.
www.socialresearchmethods.net/kb/unobtrus.php
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