Validity

• Validity is the extent to which a study measures what it intends to measure.
• Internal validity refers to whether the effects observed in a study are due to manipulation of the independent variable and not any other factor
• External validity refers to how well you can generalise the results from research participants ( apply the findings of a study ) to people, places and times outside of the study
• It can be divided into internal validity and external validity
• If there are problems with the study,

  it cannot provide a true explanation of validity
• Mundane realism is a type of validity. It refers to how realistic the task is.
• (mundane realism) if participants are asked to memorised random words and count backwards in threes so that they can’t rehearse them in their heads, we would argue that this lacks mundane realism (how often are you asked to do that in everyday life?)
• External validity refers to how well you can generalise from research participants ( apply the findings of a study) to people, places and times outside the study
• A particular type of external validity is ecological validity
• this is how well you can generalise a study to different settings or situations. its not just about the naturalness of the enviroment.
• Ecological validity incorporates a number of ideas: participants’ awareness of the experimenter, mundane realism of the environment (how realistic the environment is), and mundane realism of the task (how realistic the way of measuring the dependent variable is). Essentially, ecological validity is the extent to

  which the research tells us what we want to know about.
• Population validity is another type of external validity. This refers to how well the sample used can be generalised to a population as a whole. For example, if a research study used just students, or all men, or all American participants, then it may not be appropriate to generalise the findings to all people.
• Temporal validity is also a type of external validity and refers to the extent to which the findings and conclusions of study are valid when we consider the differences and progressions that come with time. For example, would a study conducted in the 1950s still apply today?
• External validity is affected by internal validity. You can’t generalise the results of a study that lacks internal validity. This is because the results have no meaning for the behaviour that they were studying.