What is external validity?

What is external validity?

• A. How valid results are outside of a research setting.
• B. How the methods translate to real-life settings.
• C. The frequency of measurement across participants.
• D. The consistency of results across different samples.

Answer: (A)

External validity is about whether the findings of a study can generalize beyond the specific situation in which the research was conducted. The best statement captures that idea by saying results remain valid outside the research setting, addressing generalization to other contexts and real-world conditions. Ecological validity is related but narrower, focusing on how realistic the setting and tasks are; the broader notion of external validity includes generalizing to different places, people, and times, not just real-life realism. The other options miss this broader sense: one describes realism of the setting rather than generalizability across contexts, and the others refer to how often measurements are taken or how consistent results are across samples, which relate more to sampling or reliability than to external validity.

External validity is about whether the findings of a study can generalize beyond the specific situation in which the research was conducted. The best statement captures that idea by saying results remain valid outside the research setting, addressing generalization to other contexts and real-world conditions. Ecological validity is related but narrower, focusing on how realistic the setting and tasks are; the broader notion of external validity includes generalizing to different places, people, and times, not just real-life realism. The other options miss this broader sense: one describes realism of the setting rather than generalizability across contexts, and the others refer to how often measurements are taken or how consistent results are across samples, which relate more to sampling or reliability than to external validity.