External Validity in IS Survey Research

Internal and External Validity in Clinical Research

dvances in clinical psychology critically depend on methods researchers use for investigating the causal relationships among variables. Research questions commonly include issues about the putative mechanisms associated with various forms of psychopathology (e.g., do dysfunctional beliefs cause depression?) and questions about the effects of treatments (e.g., does cognitive therapy cause a grea...

Why internal validity is not prior to external validity

Instantiation Validity in IS Design Research

Studies that involve information technology artifacts play a prominent role in Information Systems (IS) research. We argue that special attention needs to be paid to ensuring the validity of such studies. This paper makes three contributions to IS research. First, it introduces the concept of instantiation validity as broadly applicable to IS design research, and distinct from existing notions ...

Validity Threats in Empirical Software Engineering Research - An Initial Survey

In judging the quality of a research study it is very important to consider threats to the validity of the study and the results. This is particularly important for empirical research where there is often a multitude of possible threats. With a growing focus on empirical research methods in software engineering it is important that there is a consensus in the community on this importance, that ...

Weighting for External Validity∗

External validity is a challenge in treatment effect estimation. Even in randomized trials, the experimental sample often differs from the population of interest. If participation decisions are explained by observed variables such differences can be overcome by reweighting. However, participation may depend on unobserved variables. Even in such cases, under a common support assumption there exi...