In psychometrics, content validity (also known as "logical validity) refers to the extent to which a measure represents all facets of a given social concept. For example, a depression scale may lack content validity if it only assesses the affective dimension of depression but fails to take into account the behavioral dimension. For information regarding the parapsychology phenomenon of distance knowledge, see psychometry. ... In statistics a valid measure is one which is measuring what it is supposed to measure. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged into Social constructionism. ...
Content validity is related to face validity, although content validity requires more rigorous statistical tests than face validity, which only requires an intuitive judgement. Content validity is most often addressed in academic and vocational testing, where test items need to reflect the knowledge actually required for a given topic area (e.g., History) or job skill (e.g., Accounting). In clinical settings, content validity refers to the correpsondence between test items and the symptom content of a syndrome.
A common approach, called criterion validity, is to correlate measures with a criterion measure known to be valid.
Contentvalidity, or face validity, is simply a demonstration that the items of a test are drawn from the domain being measured; it does not guarantee that the test actually measures phenomena in that domain.
According to classical test theory, predictive or concurrent validity cannot exceed the square of the correlation between two versions of the same measure -- that is, validity cannot exceed reliability.
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