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External Validity

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Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences

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Definition

External validity refers to the degree to which conclusions from experimental scientific studies can be generalized from the specific set of conditions under which the study is conducted to other populations, settings, treatments, measurements, times, and experimenters.

Introduction

The ultimate goal of experimental scientific studies is to advance our understanding of real-life processes and phenomena. In research on individual differences it is rarely feasible to design experiments that involve thousands of participants and conditions that closely resemble the real world. Researchers usually seek to study an assumed cause-effect relationship without the interference of myriads of extraneous variables in real-life settings. To this purpose, they set up an experimental situation which allows to focus on the assumed cause-effect relationship and to control potentially confounding effects of extraneous variables. As a result, an artificial situation that differs from the real...

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References

  • Bracht, G. H., & Glass, G. V. (1968). The external validity of experiments. American Educational Research Journal, 5(4), 437–474.

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  • Campbell, D., & Stanley, J. (1963). Experimental and quasi-experimental designs for research. Chicago: Rand-McNally.

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  • Henrich, J., Heine, S. J., & Norenzayan, A. (2010). Most people are not WEIRD. Nature, 466(7302), 29–29.

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  • Lynch, J. G. (1982). On the external validity of experiments in consumer research. Journal of Consumer Research, 9(3), 225–239.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Luxembourg, Esch-sur-Alzette, Belval, Luxembourg

    Christoph J. Kemper

Authors
  1. Christoph J. Kemper
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Christoph J. Kemper .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Oakland University, Rochester, USA

    Virgil Zeigler-Hill

  2. Oakland University, Rochester, USA

    Todd K. Shackelford

Section Editor information

  1. Humboldt University, Germany, Berlin, Germany

    Matthias Ziegler

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Kemper, C.J. (2017). External Validity. In: Zeigler-Hill, V., Shackelford, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8_1303-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8_1303-1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-28099-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-28099-8

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