Ecological validity


In research, the ecological validity of a study is the extent to which the materials and setting of the study approximate to the real-world context that is being examined. Unlike internal and external validity, ecological validity is not necessary to the overall validity of a study.
The original meaning of 'ecological validity' defines it narrowly as a property of stimuli in perceptual experiments.

Vs. Realism and external validity

The term "ecological validity" is now widely used by researchers unfamiliar with the origins and technical meaning of the term to be broadly equivalent to what Aronson and Carlsmith called "mundane realism." Mundane realism references the extent to which the experimental situation is similar to situations people are likely to encounter outside the laboratory. For example, mock-jury research is designed to study how people might act if they were jurors during a trial, but many mock-jury studies simply provide written transcripts or summaries of trials, and do so in classroom or office settings. Such experiments do not approximate the actual look, feel, and procedure of a real courtroom trial, and therefore lack mundane realism. The better-recognized concern is that of external validity: if the results from such a mock-jury study are reproduced in and generalize across trials where these stimulus materials, settings, and other background characteristics vary, then the measurement process may be deemed externally valid.
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