In social science and psychometrics, construct validity refers to whether a scale measures the unobservable social construct (such as "fluid intelligence") that it purports to measure. The unobservable idea of a unidimensional easier-to-harder dimension must be "constructed" in the words of human language and graphics. Terms like SOSE (Studies of Society & the Environment) not only refer to social sciences but also studies of the environment. ... For information regarding the parapsychology phenomenon of distance knowledge, see psychometry. ... Scaling is the measurement of a variable in such a way that it can be expressed on a continuum. ... Social scientists and literary scholars have claimed that many things are social constructions or social constructs, or that they have been socially constructed. ... In psychometrics, fluid and crystallized intelligence (abbreviated gf and gc respectively) are factors of intelligence test scores originally described by Raymond Cattell. ...
A construct is not restricted to one set of observable indicators or attributes. It is common to a number of sets of indicators. Thus, "construct validity" can be evaluated by statistical methods that show whether or not a common factor can be shown to exist underlying several measurements using different observable indicators. This view of a construct rejects the operationist past that a construct is neither more nor less than the operations used to measure it. In statistics a valid measure is one which is measuring what it is supposed to measure. ... A graph of a bell curve in a normal distribution showing statistics used in educational assessment, comparing various grading methods. ...
In this regard it should be noted that the validity of a measure of a construct is a problem distinct from that of the use of that measure in predicting a second measure, though the latter can often contribute to constructvalidation.
The lower the amount of variance in true validity coefficients remaining after the effects of statistical artifacts are removed from the distribution of observed validities, the greater the generalization that is possible to a new situation involving similar job and test types.
When content-related evidence serves as a significant demonstration of validity for a particular test use, a clear definition of the universe represented, its relevance to the proposed test use, and the procedures followed in generating test content to represent that universe should be described.
A poor construct may be characterized by lack of theoretical agreement on its content, or by flawed operationalization such that its indicators may be construed as measuring one thing by one researcher and another thing by another researcher.
A construct is a way of defining something, and to the extent that a researcher's proposed construct is at odds with the existing literature on related hypothesized relationships using other measures, its constructvalidity is suspect.
Discriminant validity, the second major type of constructvalidity, refers to the principle that the indicators for different constructs should not be so highly correlated as to lead one to conclude that they measure the same thing.
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