Ecological validity

In the behavioral sciences, ecological validity is often used to refer to the judgement of whether a given study's variables and conclusions are sufficiently relevant to its population (e.g. the "real-world" context). Authors like Brewer claim a tie of this use to the original meaning in Brunswik advocating "representative design", [1] However, Brunswik's concern was whether test and extrapolation settings matched in terms of correlations among cues – not some more general notion or realism. Those using this altered sense of ecological validity are not founding this in any statistical conception of generality of findings across settings or statistical statementsrelated to the methodological validity of a study (i.e. inferences made about the variables studied).[2] Essentially, ecological validity is an impressionistic commentary on the relative strength of a study's implication(s) for policy, society, culture, etc., rather than on inferences related to the given variables. It is a subjective similarity judgement as entailed in Tversky and Kahneman's representativeness heuristic.

For the ecological validity of a cue in perception, see ecological validity (perception).

The original meaning of ecological validity defines it narrowly as a property of stimuli in perceptual experiments.[3] "Ecological validity" reflects the correlation in the real world between a cue and some criterion.

Versus realism and external validity

The term "ecological validity" is now widely used by researchers unfamiliar with the origins and technical meaning of the term to be broadly equivalent to what Aronson and Carlsmith (1968)[4] called "mundane realism." Mundane realism references the extent to which the experimental situation is similar to situations people are likely to encounter outside the laboratory. For example, mock-jury research is designed to study how people might act if they were jurors during a trial, but many mock-jury studies simply provide written transcripts or summaries of trials, and do so in classroom or office settings. Such experiments do not approximate the actual look, feel, and procedure of a real courtroom trial, and therefore lack mundane realism. The better-recognized concern is that of external validity: if the results from such a mock-jury study are reproduced in and generalize across trials where these stimulus materials, settings, and other background characteristics vary, then the measurement process may be deemed externally valid.

See also

References
  1. Brewer, M. (2000). Research Design and Issues of Validity. In Reis, H. and Judd, C. (eds) Handbook of Research Methods in Social and Personality Psychology. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.
  2. Shadish, W., Cook, T., and Campbell, D. (2002). Experimental and Quasi-Experimental Designs for Generalized Causal Inference Boston:Houghton Mifflin.
  3. Hammond, Kenneth R. (September 1998). "Ecological Validity: Then and Now". University at Albany. Retrieved 31 January 2017.
  4. Aronson, E., & Carlsmith, J. M. (1968). Experimentation in social psychology. In G. Lindzey & E. Aronson (Eds.), The handbook of social psychology (2nd ed., Vol. 2, pp. 1–79). Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
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