asking people “Do you feel nervous interacting with others? ”or“Are you
uncomfortable meeting new people? ”is probably measuring something like
social anxiety.
The test would have good face validity . That is, on the face of it, the test
appears to be measuring social anxiety. Although most tests have good face
validity, not all do. Some hypothetical constructs don ’t lend themselves to ob-
vious questions. For example, how would you design a test to measure creativ-ity? Asking people “Are you creative? ”probably won ’t help much. Instead,
you might ask people to write an ending to a story or to name as many uses
as they can think of for an ordinary object. These tests might be good measures
of creativity, but the face validity would be less certain than with morestraightforward measures.
Congruent Validity
Image that you developed a new intelligence test that takes less time to ad-
minister than most commonly used tests. You ’d probably want to see how
scores from your test compare with scores on an established intelligence test.
But suppose you gave both tests to a group of people and found a correlation
of only .20 between the two test scores. In this case, a person could attain a
high score on one intelligence test and a low score on the other, leaving youto wonder which is the true measure of intelligence. This is not to say that
the old scale is measuring intelligence and your scale is not, but the low corre-
lation would mean that the two tests are not measuring the same construct.
The congruent validity of a test, sometimes called convergent validity, is
the extent to which scores from the test correlate with other measures of thesame construct. If two tests measure the same thing, scores from the two testsshould be highly correlated. However, congruent validity data are not limited
to personality tests. For example, to determine the construct validity of an
anxiety scale, you might compare test scores with anxiety ratings provided
by a team of professional psychologists.
Discriminant Validity
In contrast to congruent validity, discriminant validity refers to the extent to
which a test score does notcorrelate with the scores of theoretically unrelated
measures. Let ’s return to the problem of designing a creativity test. It is im-
portant to show that the test measures creativity instead of something that
only resembles creativity, such as intelligence. To establish discriminant valid-
ity, you might give both the creativity test and an intelligence test to a groupof people. If the two test scores are highly correlated, someone could argue
that your creativity test does not measure creativity at all, but simply intelli-
gence. If the correlation between the two tests is low, you have evidence thatthe two tests measure different constructs.
Behavioral Validation
Suppose you used scores on an assertiveness scale to predict how people re-
spond when they receive poor service at a restaurant. Naturally, you would36 CHAPTER 2 Personality Research Methods