What is the relationship between external validity and the c

What is the relationship between external validity and the college sophomore problem?

Solution

External validity is the validity of generalized (causal) inferences in scientific research, usually based on experiments as experimental validity. In other words, it is the extent to which the results of a study can be generalized to other situations and to other people

Threats to external validity

\"A threat to external validity is an explanation of how you might be wrong in making a generalization.\"^[3] Generally, generalizability is limited when the cause (i.e. the independent variable) depends on other factors; therefore, all threats to external validity interact with the independent variable - a so-called background factor x treatment interaction.^[4]

College sophomores feature prominently in social scientific research but are frequently criticized for providing unrepresentative, invalid, and unreliable data. Using the case of personality and politics, the present authors evaluated those critiques, concluding that college sophomores are not representative of the general adult population on all 5 factors of personality. Despite this limitation, analyses show that the relationship between personality and political opinions is virtually identical for college students and a comparison group of adults. Further, a range of reliability statistics suggests that college students provide reliable data on personality. College students are not a panacea for the problems of participant recruiting, but they should not be discounted as unreliable and invalid, either. In many cases, the so-called \"college-sophomore problem\" is not a problem.