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Concept
Ecological validity
Résumé
In the behavioral sciences, ecological validity is often used to refer to the judgment of whether a given study's variables and conclusions (often collected in lab) are sufficiently relevant to its population (e.g. the "real world" context). Psychological studies are usually conducted in laboratories though the goal of these studies is to understand human behavior in the real-world. Ideally, an experiment would have generalizable results that predict behavior outside of the lab, thus having more ecological validity. Ecological validity can be considered a commentary on the relative strength of a study's implication(s) for policy, society, culture, etc.
This term was originally coined by Egon Brunswik and held a very narrow meaning that has since been conceptually modified. He regarded ecological validity as the utility of a perceptual cue in predicting a property (basically how informative the cue is). For example, the movement of leaves on trees is a perceptual cue to how windy it is outside. Therefore, trees rustling has high ecological validity because it is highly correlated with it being windy.
Due to the evolving and broad definition of ecological validity, problematic usage of this term in modern scientific studies occurs because it is often not defined and interpreted differently in the scientific community. In fact, in many cases just being specific about what behavior/context you are testing makes addressing ecological validity unnecessary in studies.
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 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 while in a classroom or office settings.
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