What types of validation are there? What it is? You will find answers to these and other questions in the article. Validity in its essence is a single characteristic that includes, on the one hand, data on whether the technology is suitable for measuring what it was developed for, and on the other hand, what is its effectiveness, practical utility, and effectiveness. Verification of technology validity is called validation. We will consider it in more detail below.
Kinds
Many people ask, "Validation is what it is." It is said that for a refined mind there are no boundaries. Methodologists seem to compete among themselves in who will discover or come up with the types and types of validity more. What kind of items have not arisen recently! It turns out there are:
- validity is external and internal;
- convergent;
- discriminant;
- obvious;
- factorial;
- prognostic;
- constructive;
- criterial;
- meaningful and so on.
To understand, and even more sensibly distinguish one variation from another, there is no way. The confusion in the definition and classifications leads to the fact that different authors attribute to the same form of validity completely heterogeneous ways to improve it.
External criteria
To execute the pragmatic validation of the method, that is, to evaluate its practical significance, effectiveness, efficiency, an external independent criterion is usually used - an indicator of the indication of the quality being studied in everyday life. This criterion can be both production achievements (for professional-oriented technologies), and academic performance (for intelligence tests, achievements or learning abilities), and the effectiveness of actual activities - modeling, drawing and so on (for tests of special skills), personal assessments (for identity verification).
The types of external validation criteria are as follows:
- performance measures (these may include such as the amount of work performed, time spent on training, academic performance, growth rate of qualifications, and the like);
- physiological signs (used in studying the effects of the environment and other situational variables on the psyche and the human body);
- blood pressure, pulse rate, symptoms of fatigue, skin electrical resistance and so on are measured;
- subjective measurements (include various types of answers reflecting a person’s attitude to someone or something, his views, opinions, preferences; as a rule, such measurements are obtained using questionnaires, questionnaires, interviews);
- signs of accidents (used when the purpose of the study concerns, for example, breeding problems for the work of people who are less susceptible to accidents).
Empirical validity. What are you talking about?
Few know what empirical validation is. In the case of substantive validity, the test is evaluated by experts (establishing compliance of the test tasks with the content of the measurement object). And the empirical is always measured using the correlation of the statistical: the correlation of two types of values is calculated - points for the test and indices for the external parameter, selected in the form of a reliability criterion.
Constructive
Types of validation methods are not known to everyone. What is construct validity? It has a bearing on the theoretical construct in itself and consists of a search for factors that explain the behavior during the execution of the test.
As a specific type, construct validity is legalized in an article by Mil and Cronbach (1955). Using this form of validity, the authors evaluated all test surveys that were not directly aimed at predicting some significant criteria. The investigation contained information about psychological constructs.
Content Validity
You still ask: "Validation is what it is." Consider content validity. It requires that each task, question or task belonging to the established area have identical chances to turn into test tasks.
The validity of the content evaluates the suitability of the essence of the test measured area of behavior. Verifications created by two development groups are carried out on a sample of verified ones. The reliability of the tests is calculated by splitting the questions into two zones, resulting in an index of meaningful validity.
Predictive
We continue to consider validation methods. Predictive validity is also established by an external, fairly reliable criterion. But information about him is collected some time after the verification.
The external measure is usually the individual’s calling for the type of occupation for which he was selected based on the results of diagnostic tests.
Although this method is most appropriate for the task of diagnostic tools - predicting future success, it is very difficult to apply. The accuracy of the prediction is inversely dependent on the time allotted for such a prediction. The more time passes after the measurement, the more factors must be taken into account when evaluating the prognostic value of the technology. However, it is almost impossible to take into account all the factors influencing the prediction.
Retrospective
Agree, validation is a very complicated process. It is known that retrospective validity is identified on the basis of a criterion that reflects a state of quality or an event in the past. It can be used to instantly obtain data on predictive technology sources. So, to revise the extent to which good results of a skill test correspond to fast learning, you can compare previous expert opinions, performance indicators, and so on for people with low and high diagnostic indices at the moment.
Discriminant and convergent
Types of validation are interesting to many. Find out what constitutes discriminant and convergent validity. The strategy for introducing established items into the test depends on how the psychologist identifies the diagnostic construct. If Eisenck defines the quality of "neuroticism" as independent of introversion-extroversion, then this means that his questionnaire should contain equally positions that would be approved by neurotic extraverts and introverts.
If in practice it turns out that points from the quadrant “introversion-neuroticism” will prevail in the task, then from the perspective of Eysenck's theory, this means that the indicator “neuroticism” is loaded with an irrelevant indicator - “introversion”. An identical effect appears when there is a bias in the sample - if there are more neurotic introverts in it than there are similar extroverts.
In order to avoid such difficulties, psychologists wish to deal with such empirical points that inform only about a single factor. But in reality, this requirement is never fulfilled: each empirical index is determined not only by the factor that we need, but also by other factors that are irrelevant to the measurement problem.
Thus, in relation to factors conceptually defined as orthogonal to the measurable (occurring with it in all combinations), the test creator is obliged, selecting items, to use a non-genuine balancing strategy.
The conformity of the points to the measured indicator guarantees the convergent validity of the test. The consistency of the points regarding irrelevant sources ensures discriminatory validity. Empirically, it manifests itself in the absence of a significant correlation with the test, measuring out conceptually individual quality.
Tool kit
In a common set of validation methods, authors typically include:
- unformalized (from uncomplicated techniques to carefully review the list of alternatives in the questionnaire to more sophisticated theoretical phased analysis procedures);
- formalized, which include the procedures and technologies of mathematical statistics: verification of statistical hypotheses, calculation of estimates, correlation analysis, construction of confidence intervals, estimation of relations between variables, variance, factorial, regression and structural analyzes, and so on.
Tool making
And yet, validation is what is it? Refined tools of validation were first created by psychologists. Back in 1959, a special technique was developed by D. Fiske and D. Campbell (USA). She received a completely natural for English, but untranslated into our language, name: multimethod-multi-trace matrix (MTMM). This matrix was a correlation table. It consisted of two very attractive inventions, one of which was intended to reveal convergent truth, and the other to discriminant.
Its authors claimed that everyone could prove internal acceptability if:
- values between which a high level of theoretical connection is assumed will reveal an identical level in empiricism (convergence);
- values that are theoretically unrelated to each other will turn out to be unrelated and empirically after the execution of the test (discrimination).
Roughly speaking, converged validity should declare that between two teams of hired specialists, for example, construction and conveyor workers, there are much more similarities in terms of chances in the labor market than between owners and hired workers. If a theoretically intended relationship has been identified empirically, your sample is valid.
Discriminant validity shows the degree of identification of various phenomena. If we take the same example with the labor market, we should expect that a well-constructed theory can use it to distinguish the capabilities of owners and employees in the labor market. You cannot confuse them, and your theory is able to distinguish them.
If you created a scale that measures mathematical abilities, then in the case of the validity of convergent indices of mathematical talents should correlate well with general human skills, if at the theoretical level there is such a connection, and badly with aesthetic abilities that require completely different talents from a person than counting skills if, of course, a low correlation is proclaimed by your theory.
Types
Validization is the process of tuning, improving the created psycho-diagnostic methods. Its basic task is to ensure that the technology diagnoses exactly what the developer needs. Distinguish between theoretical and pragmatic validation.
For the first type, the cardinal problem is the relationship between psychic phenomena and their indices, with the help of which they try to cognize these phenomena. It shows that the results of the methodology and the abstract intention of the author coincide.
To establish abstract validity, it is very difficult to find any independent criterion that resides outside the methodology. In the history of psychodiagnostics in the early stages, therefore, the reliance was on the instinctive concept that the test measures:
- The method was recognized as valid if it is simply “obvious”.
- The proof of validity was based on the confidence of the prospector that his technology allows him to “understand the test person”.
- The scheme was considered as valid only because the theory on the basis of which the technology was created is “very good”.
Then began the search for evidence justified by science. It should be noted here that the imperceptible accumulation of an arsenal of technologies with already valid and well-known validity is of great importance in this process. If psychodiagnostics creates a scheme for evaluating any quality and it is known that other valid technologies are aimed at the same assessment, then you can study the correlation, compare the results by someone else's and your own method.
If the correlation coefficient is too high, then the created scheme has impressive abstract validity. If you doubt what the technology gives the assessment, compare the results of it with the results of other valid schemes that recognize related (suspicious) properties. If the correlation values turn out to be unexpectedly large, we can conclude that the method does not evaluate what was expected.
Thus, if there are already other people's schemes aimed at measuring exactly the same norms or related ones, one can determine the discriminant and convergent validity.
Nuances
So validation - what is it? In simple words, it’s an audit of the product on how much it matches the declared characteristics. That is, some smartphone will not pass validation until then. Until customers make sure that it is equipped with just such a camera and the amount of memory for which they are willing to pay.
The criterion of validation is the measure of mental quality that is independent and immediate from the validated test, the study of which is aimed at a psychodiagnostic scheme.
Current validity is a feature of the test, reflecting its ability to distinguish between subjects on the basis of a diagnostic feature that is the object of study in this method.
Competitive validity is assessed by correlation of the created test with others whose validity with respect to the measured parameter is established. Differential validity can be interpreted as an example of interest tests.