Why Conventional Practices in Construct Validation Provide Limited Evidence of Construct Validity

The construct validity of psychometric instruments is a foundation of psychological science, ensuring that they measure their intended constructs rather than unintended ones. Yet some conventional construct validation practices produce weak, uninformative evidence and fall short of the strong, risk-bearing tests emphasized by validity theorists. As a result, the available evidence is often insufficient to support meaningful claims about construct validity. To address this issue, we introduce a framework based on Meehl’s logic of hypothesis testing that can be used to evaluate the evidential value (or quality) of construct validation efforts. We define evidential value as the extent to which conducting a test of construct validity can shift confidence in the proposed construct interpretation over plausible alternative interpretations. Using this framework, we identify three conventional practices that contribute to low evidential value in construct validation: (a) treating constructs as conceptual placeholders, (b) overrelying on generic psychometric methods, and (c) performing post hoc revisions to the nomological network (i.e., the Lakatosian defense). This article demonstrates how using these practices allows virtually any psychometric measure to be portrayed as “validated”, while providing only nominal evidence of construct validity. We offer recommendations to guide researchers in achieving construct validation of high evidential value.