Psychometric Validity

Psychometric validity refers to as an assessment’s potential to evaluate what it claims to measure. This simply means that high validity of a test guarantees that the test items or questions are closely linked to the test’s intended core focus. A relative concept, psychometric validity is highly dependent on the reliability of the test.

According to Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing (AERA, APA, & NCME, 1999), psychometric validity refers to “the degree to which evidence and theory support the interpretations of test scores entailed by proposed uses of tests”. Psychometric validity is an essential component of psychometric testing because it is directly related to the meaning of the test results. Traditional psychometricians bifurcate psychometric validity into multiple validities, like content validity, criterion validity, construct validity, etc. Another school of thought views psychometric validity as a single construct.