In psychometrics, content validity (also known as face validity or 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. ...
A common approach, called criterion validity, is to correlate measures with a criterion measure known to be valid.
Content validity, or facevalidity, 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.
Facevalidity basically amounts to what Buck (2001) refers to as "faith validity" -- the belief that a test is OK without empirical evidence.
Since facevalidity is based primarily on the judgements of novices, this concept might be interesting in terms of a business marketing perspective, but it is not a validation yardstick test developers should focus on.
It could be argued that facevalidity encourages a cosmetic approach to test construction which emphasizing surface appearance rather the operationalization of testing concepts.
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