External Validity

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The two concepts regarding an experiment’s validity are called internal and external validity. These two concepts are inversely proportional (Huitt, Hummel, & Kaeck, 1999). There are a many things that contribute to internal and external validity, and this makes the levels of internal and external validity vary with different trials of an experiment. First of all, the meaning of internal validity is the approximate truth regarding cause-effect or causal relationships (Trochim, W.M., 2006). In other words, what internal validity does is it is a measure of the relationship between the independent and dependent variables. What this means is that a high level of internal validity in an experiment shows that there was a high causal relationship between the independent variable and the dependent variable. It was so specific in the experiment that the experimenter was able to figure out what affected the dependent variable in this specific case. Although this specific experiment is internally valid, it cannot be generalized. This is because in that specific experiment, there were many variables that were controlled and there was focus only on a select few. This means that the experiment lacked external validity.…show more content…
External validity is basically how well your study can apply to other people rather than the people in the experiment. The way to improve external validity to randomly select rather than a nonrandom select (Trochim, W.M., 2006). This is done so that the sample chosen will be the representation of the population. This way, whatever results one gets from experimenting on the random sample, they can apply these results to the general population. This ability to apply the results to others is called generalization. This is the overall concept of external

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