Internal and external validity are concepts that reflect whether or not the results of a study are trustworthy

and meaningful. While internal validity relates to how well a study is conducted (its structure), external
validity relates to how applicable the findings are to the real world.

Internal Validity
Internal validity is the extent to which a study establishes a trustworthy cause-and-
effect relationship between a treatment and an outcome.1 It also reflects that a given study makes
it possible to eliminate alternative explanations for a finding. For example, if you implement a
smoking cessation program with a group of individuals, how sure can you be that any
improvement seen in the treatment group is due to the treatment that you administered?

Internal validity depends largely on the procedures of a study and how rigorously it is performed.

Internal validity is not a "yes or no" type of concept. Instead, we consider how confident we can
be with the findings of a study, based on whether it avoids traps that may make the findings
questionable.

The less chance there is for "confounding" in a study, the higher the internal validity and the
more confident we can be in the findings. Confounding refers to a situation in which other
factors come into play that confuses the outcome of a study. For instance, a study might make us
unsure as to whether we can trust that we have identified the above "cause-and-effect" scenario.

In short, you can only be confident that your study is internally valid if you can rule out
alternative explanations for your findings. As a brief summary, you can only assume cause-and-
effect when you meet the following three criteria in your study:

1. The cause preceded the effect in terms of time.

2. The cause and effect vary together.
3. There are no other likely explanations for this relationship that you have observed.

Factors That Improve Internal Validity

If you are looking to improve the internal validity of a study, you will want to consider aspects of
your research design that will make it more likely that you can reject alternative hypotheses.
There are many factors that can improve internal validity.

 Randomization refers to randomly assigning participants to treatment and control groups, and
ensures that there is not any systematic bias between groups.
 Random selection of participants refers to choosing your participants at random or in a manner
in which they are representative of the population that you wish to study.
 Blinding in a study refers to participants—and sometimes researchers—being unaware of
what intervention they are receiving (such as by using a placebo in a medication study) to
avoid this knowledge biasing their perceptions and behaviors and thus the outcome of the
study.
  Experimental manipulation refers to manipulating an independent variable in a study
(for instance, giving smokers a cessation program) instead of just observing an
association without conducting any intervention (examining the relationship between
exercise and smoking behavior).
 Study protocol refers to following specific procedures for the administration of a
treatment so as not to introduce any effects of, for example, doing things differently with
one group of people versus another group of people.

Factors That Threaten Internal Validity

Just as there are many ways to ensure that a study is internally valid, there is also a list of
potential threats to internal validity that should be considered when planning a study.2

 Confounding refers to a situation in which changes in an outcome variable can be thought to

have resulted from some third variable that is related to the treatment that you administered.
 Historical events may influence the outcome of studies that occur over a period of time.
Examples of these events might include a change in political leader or natural disaster that
influences how study participants feel and act.
 Maturation refers to the impact of time as a variable in a study. If a study takes place over a
period of time in which it is possible that participants naturally changed in some way (grew older,
became tired), then it may be impossible to rule out whether effects seen in the study were simply
due to the effect of time.
 Testing refers to the effect of repeatedly testing participants using the same measures. If you give
someone the same test three times, isn't it likely that they will do better as they learn the test or
become used to the testing process so that they answer differently?
 Instrumentation refers to the impact of the actual testing instruments used in a study on how
participants respond. While it may sound unusual, it's possible to "prime" participants in a study
in certain ways with the measures that you use, which causes them to react in a way that is
different than they would have otherwise.
 Statistical regression refers to the natural effect of participants at extreme ends of a measure
falling in a certain direction just due to the passage of time rather than the effect of an
intervention.
 Attrition refers to participants dropping out or leaving a study, which means that the results are
based on a biased sample of only the people who did not choose to leave (and possibly who all
have something in common, such as higher motivation).
 Diffusion refers to the treatment in a study spreading from the treatment group to the control
group through the groups interacting and talking with or observing one another. This can also
lead to another issue called resentful demoralization, in which a control group tries less hard
because they feel resentful over the group that they are in.
 Experimenter bias refers to an experimenter behaving in a different way with different groups in
a study, which leads to an impact on the results of this study (and is eliminated through blinding).

External Validity
External validity refers to how well the outcome of a study can be expected to apply to other
settings. In other words, this type of validity refers to how generalizable the findings are. For
instance, do the findings apply to other people, settings, situations, and time periods?
Ecological validity, an aspect of external validity, refers to whether a study's findings can be
generalized to the real world.

While rigorous research methods can ensure internal validity, external validity, on the other
hand, may be limited by these methods.

Another term called transferability relates to external validity and refers to the qualitative
research design. Transferability refers to whether results transfer to situations with similar
characteristics.

Factors that Improve External Validity

What can you do to improve the external validity of your study?

 Inclusion and exclusion criteria should be used to ensure that you have clearly defined the
population that you are studying in your research.
 Psychological realism refers to making sure that participants are experiencing the events of a
study as a real event and can be achieved by telling them a "cover story" about the aim of the
study. Otherwise, in some cases, participants might behave differently than they would in real life
if they know what to expect or know what the aim of the study is.
 Replication refers to conducting the study again with different samples or in different settings to
see if you get the same results. When many studies have been conducted, meta-analysis can also
be used to determine if the effect of an independent variable is reliable (based on examining the
findings of a large number of studies on one topic).
 Field experiments can also be used in which you conduct a study outside the laboratory in a
natural setting.
 Reprocessing or calibration refers to using statistical methods to adjust for problems related to
external validity. For example, if a study had uneven groups for some characteristic (such as age),
reweighting might be used.

Factors That Threaten External Validity

External validity is threatened when a study does not take into account the interactions of
variables in the real world.2

 Situational factors such as time of day, location, noise, researcher characteristics, and how many
measures are used may affect the generalizability of findings.
 Pre- and post-test effects refer to the situation in which the pre- or post-test is in some way
related to the effect seen in the study, such that the cause-and-effect relationship disappears
without these added tests.
 Sample features refer to the situation in which some feature of the particular sample was
responsible for the effect (or partially responsible), leading to limited generalizability of the
findings.
 Selection bias refers to the problem of differences between groups in a study that may relate to
the independent variable (once again, something like motivation or willingness to take part in the
study, specific demographics of individuals being more likely to take part in an online survey).3
This can also be considered a threat to internal validity.
Similarities and Differences
Internal and external validity are like two sides of the same coin. You can have a study with
good internal validity, but overall it could be irrelevant to the real world. On the other hand, you
could conduct a field study that is highly relevant to the real world, but that doesn't have
trustworthy results in terms of knowing what variables caused the outcomes that you see.

Similarities

What are the similarities between internal and external validity? They are both factors that
should be considered when designing a study, and both have implications in terms of whether the
results of a study have meaning. Both are not "either/or" concepts, and so you will always be
deciding to what degree your study performs in terms of both types of validity.

Each of these concepts is typically reported in a research article that is published in a scholarly
journal. This is so that other researchers can evaluate the study and make decisions about
whether the results are useful and valid.
Differences

The essential difference between internal and external validity is that internal validity refers to
the structure of a study and its variables while external validity relates to how universal the
results are.4 There are further differences between the two as well.

Internal Validity
 Focus on accuracy and strong research methods
 Controls extraneous variables
 Conclusions are warranted
 Eliminates alternative explanations
External Validity
 Results translate to world at large
 Findings are generalizable
 Outcomes apply to practical situations
 Results can be translated into another context