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External validity is the validity of applying the conclusions of a scientific study outside the context of that study. [1] In other words, it is the extent to which the results of a study can generalize or transport to other situations, people, stimuli, and times.
Internal validity, therefore, is more a matter of degree than of either-or, and that is exactly why research designs other than true experiments may also yield results with a high degree of internal validity. In order to allow for inferences with a high degree of internal validity, precautions may be taken during the design of the study.
This strategy is advantageous because it moderates several threats to validity, and history effects in particular. [2] [4] Concurrent multiple baseline designs are also useful for saving time, since all participants are processed at once. The ability to retrieve complete data sets within well defined time constraints is a valuable asset while ...
ABA is an applied science devoted to developing procedures which will produce observable changes in behavior. [3] [7] It is to be distinguished from the experimental analysis of behavior, which focuses on basic experimental research, [8] but it uses principles developed by such research, in particular operant conditioning and classical conditioning.
In other words, the relevance of external and internal validity to a research study depends on the goals of the study. Furthermore, conflating research goals with validity concerns can lead to the mutual-internal-validity problem, where theories are able to explain only phenomena in artificial laboratory settings but not the real world. [13] [14]
Validity has two distinct fields of application in psychology. The first is test validity (or Construct validity ), the degree to which a test measures what it was designed to measure. The second is experimental validity (or External validity ), the degree to which a study supports the intended conclusion drawn from the results.
It is a significant threat to a study's internal validity, and is therefore typically controlled using a double-blind experimental design. It may include conscious or unconscious influences on subject behavior including creation of demand characteristics that influence subjects, and altered or selective recording of experimental results ...
A distinction of sampling bias (albeit not a universally accepted one) is that it undermines the external validity of a test (the ability of its results to be generalized to the rest of the population), while selection bias mainly addresses internal validity for differences or similarities found in the sample at hand. In this sense, errors ...