HLT1RAE Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Criterion Validity, Content Validity, Face Validity
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Face validity means the degree to which a measurement appears, on the face of it, to measure what it is supposed to. At the very minimum a researcher who develops a new measure of a concept should establish that the measure appears to reflect the content of the concept in question. For example, an examination in a particular subject may be the only way to gauge a student(cid:821)s academic performance. To ensure the test has content validity, the lecturer might write down all the material covered in the semester, and then ask a question related to each topic. You may have had an experience where after sitting an exam, you thought it did not reflect what was covered in the course. Here you could argue that the examination measure lacked content validity: criterion validity means the measure is valid if scores correlate with other measures of the same concept (usually a well-accepted or (cid:820)gold standard(cid:821) method of measurement).
