If I’m doing research on communication apprehension and I define high apprehension as someone who has at least 8 "ums," "uhs," or "ers" in a five minute period, I have created a(n):

The correct answer to this open question is the following.

Although there are no options attached we can answer the following.

If I’m doing research on communication apprehension and I define high apprehension as someone who has at least 8 "ums," "uhs," or "ers" in a five minute period, I have created a(n): operational definition.

After doing part of your research, you will be able to get some definitions straight, created by yourself. In this case, you can come up with an operational definition. which means that you collect the proper data and define it in a clear, concise way. So your operational definition can express with clarity one of the objects of the study.

there are no options provided but you can choose among the following gender-neutral pronouns: zir, hir, eir, vis, tem, eir.

in the normal course of maintaining a pronoun-antecedent agreement, we could have used the words his or her but since we are also required to use gender-neutral language, we need to replace it with its equivalent gender-neutral pronoun.