The 6 Types of Validity in Research UGC NET

Validity tells you how accurately a method measures something. If a method measures what it claims to measure, and the results closely correspond to real-world values, then it can be considered valid. 

Factors Affecting Validity:- 

1. History:- events that occur besides the treatment (events in the environment). 
2. Maturation:- Physical or psychological changes in the participants. 
3. Testing:- effect of experience with the pretest - - become tests. 
4. Instrumentation:- learning gain might be observed from pre to post-test simply due to the nature of the instrument. Particularly a problem in observation studies is when observers are more likely to give ratings based on expectations (conscious or subconscious). 
5.  Differential Selection:- Effect of treatment confounded with other factors because of differential selection of participants, problem in non-random samples.
6.  Experimental Mortality:- participants lost from the study, attrition.

1. Internal Validity: 

It is basically the extent to which a study is free from flaws and that any differences in measurement are due to an independent variable and nothing else. 

Internal validity is the extent to which a study establishes a trustworthy cause-and-effect relationship between a treatment and an outcome.

Internal validity can be assessed based on whether extraneous (i.e. unwanted) variables that could also affect results are successfully controlled or eliminated; the greater the control of such variables, the greater the confidence that a cause and effect relevant to the construct being investigated can be found.

2. External Validity:

 It is the extent to which the results of a research study can be generalized to different situations, different groups of people, different settings, different conditions, etc.

 3. Face Validity: 

It is the extent to which the measurement method appears “on its face” to measure the construct of interest.

Example: People might have negative reactions to an intelligence test that did not appear to them to be measuring their intelligence.

4. Content Validity: 

It is the extent to which the measurement method covers the entire range of relevant behaviours, thoughts, and feelings that define the construct being measured. 

Example: 

 One’s attitude toward an object is considered to consist of thoughts about the object, feelings about the object, and behaviours toward the object. 

Therefore, a test to assess one’s attitude toward taxes should include items about thoughts, feelings, and behaviours. 

 If test anxiety is thought to include both nervous feelings and negative thoughts, then any measures of test anxiety should cover both of these aspects. 

A course exam has good content validity if it covers all the material that are supposed to learn and poor content validity if it does not.

5. Criterion Validity: 

It is the extent to which people’s scores are correlated with other variables or criteria that reflect the same construct. 

Example: 

• An IQ test should correlate positively with school performance. 
• An occupational aptitude test should correlate positively with work performance.

Types of Criterion Validity:

 a) Predictive Validity: 

A new measure of self-esteem should correlate positively with an old established measure. 

When the criterion is something that will happen or be assessed in the future, this is called predictive validity.

b) Concurrent Validity: 

When the criterion is something that is happening or being assessed at the same time as the construct of interest, it is called concurrent validity.

 6. Construct validity: 

 Construct validity is an assessment of how well you translated your ideas or theories into actual programs or measures. Construct is a way of defining something and if a researcher’s proposed construct is against the existing literature, its construct validity is doubtful.