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Other social psychologists prefer external validity to control, conducting most of their research in field studies, and many do both. Taken together, both types of studies meet the requirements of the perfect experiment. Through replication, researchers can study a given research question with maximal internal and external validity. [31]
In other words, the relevance of external and internal validity to a research study depends on the goals of the study. Furthermore, conflating research goals with validity concerns can lead to the mutual-internal-validity problem, where theories are able to explain only phenomena in artificial laboratory settings but not the real world. [13] [14]
Replication in statistics evaluates the consistency of experiment results across different trials to ensure external validity, while repetition measures precision and internal consistency within the same or similar experiments. [5] Replicates Example: Testing a new drug's effect on blood pressure in separate groups on different days.
Internal validity, therefore, is more a matter of degree than of either-or, and that is exactly why research designs other than true experiments may also yield results with a high degree of internal validity. In order to allow for inferences with a high degree of internal validity, precautions may be taken during the design of the study.
For example, high construct validity means that the research design has a higher degree of fit with the theory being studied. This makes the relationship of causal variables more stable from the statistical perspective, which supports the improvement of statistical validity. [19] Internal validity is a prerequisite for external validity.
Field experiments offer researchers a way to test theories and answer questions with higher external validity because they simulate real-world occurrences. [6] Some researchers argue that field experiments are a better guard against potential bias and biased estimators. As well, field experiments can act as benchmarks for comparing ...
Design of Experiments: A systematic, rigorous approach to engineering problem-solving that applies principles and techniques at the data collection stage so as to ensure the generation of valid, defensible, and supportable engineering conclusions [1] Design Point: A single combination of settings for the independent variables of an experiment.
Ecological validity, the ability to generalize study findings to the real world, is a subcategory of external validity. [6] Another example highlighting the differences between these terms is from an experiment that studied pointing [7] —a trait originally attributed uniquely to humans—in captive chimpanzees. This study certainly had ...