MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort
Record W3135512811 · doi:10.15626/mp.2019.1645

The Validation Crisis in Psychology

2021· article· en· W3135512811 on OpenAlexafffund
Ulrich Schimmack

Bibliographic record

VenueMeta-Psychology · 2021
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldPsychology
TopicMental Health Research Topics
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Toronto
FundersSocial Sciences and Humanities Research Council of CanadaUniversity of Toronto MississaugaUniversity of Toronto
KeywordsNomological networkConstruct (python library)Construct validityCronbach's alphaPsychologyCriterion validityExternal validityMetatheoryPredictive validityIncremental validityPsychometricsStructural equation modelingSocial psychologyComputer scienceDevelopmental psychologyMachine learning

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Cronbach and Meehl (1955) introduced the concept of construct validity and described how researchers can demonstrate that their measures have construct validity. Although the term construct validity is widely used, few researchers follow Cronbach and Meehl’s recommendation to quantify construct validity with the help of nomological networks. As a result, the construct validity of many popular measures in psychology is unknown. I call for rigorous tests of construct validity that follow Cronbach and Meehl’s recommendations to improve psychology as a science. Without valid measures even replicable results are uninformative. I suggest that a proper program of validation research requires a multi-method approach and causal modeling of correlations with structural equation models. Construct validity should be quantified to enable cost-benefit analyses and to replace existing measures with better measures that have superior construct validity.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.331
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.399
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMetaresearch
Consensus categoriesMetaresearch
DomainCandidate signal: Reproducibility · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Review · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.669
Threshold uncertainty score0.825

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.3310.399
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0040.003
Bibliometrics0.0080.004
Science and technology studies0.0070.082
Scholarly communication0.0140.035
Open science0.0040.012
Research integrity0.0130.027
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0030.001

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.349
GPT teacher head0.572
Teacher spread0.222 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; the direct Gemma label and the distilled Codex classifier agree on what is shown here.

Study designTheoretical or conceptual
DomainReproducibility
GenreReview

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations52
Published2021
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

Explore more

Same venueMeta-PsychologySame topicMental Health Research TopicsFrench-language works237,207