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

The construct validity of psychometric measures is a foundation of credible psychological science, ensuring that measures reflect their intended theoretical constructs rather than unintended ones. Yet many 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 of a measure over plausible alternative interpretations. Using this framework, we identify three conventional practices that contribute to low evidential value in construct validation: (a) treating theoretical constructs as conceptual placeholders, (b) relying on generic psychometric methods, and (c) performing post hoc revisions to the nomological network (i.e., employing 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 help researchers design construct validation studies of high evidential value.