Internal Validity

Is the extent to which a study establishes a trustworthy cause and effect relationship
between a treatment and an outcome.

In research, internal validity is the extent to which you are able to say that no other
variables except the one you’re studying caused the result.
E.g. if we are studying the variable of pay and the result of hard work, we want to be
able to say that no other reason (not personality, not motivation, not competition) causes
the hard work. We want to say that pay and pay alone makes people like Sean work harder.

We should consider how confident we can be with the finding of a study, based on whether
it avoids traps that may make the finding questionable.

The less chance of there is for confusion in a study, the higher the internal validity and the
more confident we can be in the findings. ( Can we trust we have identified the above cause
and effect)

Factors to improve validity

 Randomisation – Random assigning so there is no bias
o Random hyphens
o Data set was selected from pub med
 Random selection
 Blinding
 Experimental Manipulation
 Study Protocol – following specific procedures

Factors that threaten validity

 Confounding
 Historical Events
 Maturation
 Testing
 Instrumentation
 Statistical Regression
 Experimenter Bias

What is internal Validity?

 Confidence that changes in dependent (DV) variable are actually caused by the
independent variable (IV)

Independent Variable – The variable being manipulated

Dependent variable – the variable in which the effect of the manipulation of the
independent variable is observed.

Why is internal validity important

 We often conduct research in order to determine cause-and-effect relationships
 Can we conclude that changes in the independent variable caused the observed
changes in the dependent variable
 Internal Validity

 Is the evidence for such a conclusion good or poor?

 If a study shows a high degree of internal validity then we can conclude we have
strong evidence of causality
 If a study has low internal validity, then we must conclude we have little or no
evidence of causality.