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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.
The validity of a measurement tool (for example, a test in education) is the degree to which the tool measures what it claims to measure. [3] Validity is based on the strength of a collection of different types of evidence (e.g. face validity, construct validity, etc.) described in greater detail below.
Test validity is the extent to which a test (such as a chemical, physical, or scholastic test) accurately measures what it is supposed to measure.In the fields of psychological testing and educational testing, "validity refers to the degree to which evidence and theory support the interpretations of test scores entailed by proposed uses of tests". [1]
A true experiment would, for example, randomly assign children to a scholarship, in order to control for all other variables. Quasi-experiments are commonly used in social sciences, public health, education, and policy analysis, especially when it is not practical or reasonable to randomize study participants to the treatment condition.
Ecological validity, the ability to generalize study findings to the real world, is a subcategory of external validity. [ 6 ] Another example highlighting the differences between these terms is from an experiment that studied pointing [ 7 ] —a trait originally attributed uniquely to humans—in captive chimpanzees.
In psychometrics, criterion validity, or criterion-related validity, is the extent to which an operationalization of a construct, such as a test, relates to, or predicts, a theoretically related behaviour or outcome — the criterion.
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.
Naturalistic observation can also be used to verify external validity, permitting researchers to examine whether study findings generalize to real world scenarios. Naturalistic observation may also be conducted in lieu of structured experiments when implementing an experiment that would be too costly.