External Validity

External validity refers to the validity of inferences made from scientific research, usually based on experiment. It is the extent to which the results of a study can be generalized to other situations and to other people beyond the study sample. It is important to note that, before being able to determine whether the results of an experiment have external validity, it is important to determine whether the measures used in the experiment meet the criteria of being reliable and having representational validity.

A measure is reliable when it produces consistent results. For example, when an object is put on a scale multiple times in a row, all measurements of weight being within a few minutes of each other, one would expect the number on the ...

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