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Ecological Validity
Ecological validity is the degree to which test performance predicts behaviors in real-world settings. Today, psychologists are called upon by attorneys, insurance agencies, vocational rehabilitation counselors, and employers to draw inferences about clients' cognitive capacities and their implications in real-world settings from psychological tests. These demands have accentuated the importance of ecological validity. Originally, neuropsychological tests were created as tools for detecting and localizing neuropathology. The diagnostic utility of such assessment instruments decreased with the development of brain-imaging techniques, and neuropsychology shifted its focus toward identifying the practical implications of brain pathology. Society's increasing interest in clients' everyday abilities has necessitated further research into the ecological validity of psychological and neuropsychological tests. The dimensions, applications, limitations, and implications of ecological validity are discussed in this entry.
Dimensions
Robert Sbordone refers to ecological validity as “the functional and predictive relationship between the patient's performance on a set of neuropsychological tests and the patient's behavior in a variety of real-world settings” (Sbordone & Long, p. 16). This relationship is not absolute; tests tend to fall on a continuum ranging from low to high levels of ecological validity. Despite no universally agreed-upon definition of ecological validity, a deeper understanding of the concept can be achieved by analyzing its three dimensions: test environment, stimuli under examination, and behavioral response.
Test Environment
In the field of psychological assessment, controlled test environments are recommended to allow the client's “best performance,” and psychologists have attempted to reduce distractions, confusion, and fatigue in the testing situation. Historically, to avoid misdiagnosing brain pathology, evaluating a client's best performance was crucial. However, because neuropsychologists today are asked to predict clients' functioning in real-world settings, the ecological validity of the traditional test environment has been called into question. Unlike testing situations, the natural world does not typically provide a quiet, supportive, distraction-reduced environment. The disparity between test environments and clients' everyday environments may reduce the predictive accuracy of psychological assessments. Today, many referral questions posed to neuropsychologists call for the development of testing environments that more closely approximate real-world settings.
Stimuli under Examination
The extent to which stimuli used during testing resemble stimuli encountered in daily life should be taken into account when evaluating ecological validity. For example, the Grocery List Selective Reminding Test is a test that uses real-world stimuli. Unlike traditional paired associate or listlearning tests, which often use arbitrary stimuli, the Grocery List Selective Reminding Test employs a grocery list to evaluate verbal learning. Naturally occurring stimuli increase the ecological validity of neuropsychological tests.
Behavioral Response
Another important dimension of ecological validity is assuring that behavioral responses elicited are representative of the person's natural behaviors and appropriately related to the construct being measured. Increased levels of ecological validity would be represented in simulator assessment of driving by moving the cursor with the arrow keys, with the mouse, or with a steering wheel. The more the response approximates the criterion, the greater the ecological validity.
The two main methods of establishing ecological validity are veridicality and verisimilitude. These methods are related to, but not isomorphic with, the traditional constructs of concurrent validity/predictive validity and construct validity/ face validity, respectively.
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