Talk:Internal validity

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Described threats to internal validity tend to be specific to fields that involve human subjects but are not always generalizable across disciplines (e.g. political science, where efforts may be made, for instance, to make inferences about the effect of institutional design on some outcome of concern). Suggest improving. 207.237.249.96 (talk) 01:00, 11 February 2013 (UTC)

what is meant by validity in reference to the design of an explanatory model?

What is going on with reference number four? The citation is simply "ibid," which isn't exactly very helpful for going back to the original source. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 97.117.191.206 (talk) 20:31, 27 January 2009 (UTC) .............................. "ibid" is very helpful. it means "same again: same as the one above"

so, in this case, it means reference 4 is the same as reference 3, but the author didn't have to write out reference 3 all over again because s/he felt s/he could assume all the readers would know what "ibid" means. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 121.209.162.219 (talk) 12:49, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

Relation to Scientific Method

Hello, I'm simply someone who's begun a study of epistemology out of personal interest. Not a scientist. Not a mathematician. So apologies in advance if my comment isn't properly grounded or reasoned.

There's much confusion in the nonscientific world about the Scientific Method: how it works, why it's valuable. I think this article is missing an opportunity to clear up some of that confusion.

The current article states, "Internal validity is a property of scientific studies which reflects the extent to which a causal conclusion based on a study is warranted. Such warrant is constituted by the extent to which a study minimizes systematic error (or 'bias')."

I suggest the following edit, if it's correct, for the purpose of linking the important discussion of internal validity, to the more general discussion of The Scientific Method:

"Internal validity is one of several properties of scientific studies which reflects the extent to which a causal conclusion based on a study is warranted. Such warrant is constituted by the extent to which a study minimizes systematic error (or 'bias')."

Scientific studies, which are based on inductive logic, can never establish that a conclusion is 100% certain, due to the nature of inductive logic. However, carefully designed studies with high internal validity can indicate with extremely high probability that a scientific conclusion is valid."

Reference: http://catalog.flatworldknowledge.com/bookhub/18?e=price_1.0-ch07_s01 — Preceding unsigned comment added by Fredric5765 (talk • contribs) 18:22, 19 March 2016 (UTC)

Domain specific?

Hi.

I noticed this. The first paragraph of this article goes like this:

"In scientific research, internal validity is the extent to which a causal conclusion based on a study is warranted, which is determined by the degree to which a study minimizes systematic error (or 'bias'). It contrasts with external validity, the degree to which it is warranted to generalize results to other contexts."

It suggests that this is a general concept throughout all scientific research. Yet it seems the bulk of the article is worded in a way that suggests this concept is primarily used in "social science" fields and medicine, with little to no references to the natural sciences. Although it does seem much of the concepts described do transfer to that case. When I google for the topic, including on Google Books, it seems books and reference material about social science fields generally comes up. There seems something amiss here and I think it's with the article. I don't know if the intro should be changed, or the body changed to perhaps include more examples from harder or natural fields if these concepts are truly a general feature of "scientific research" with no qualifiers, or what. mike4ty4 (talk) 10:35, 19 August 2016 (UTC)