Face validity is the extent to which a measurement method appears “on its face” to measure the construct of interest. Most people would expect a self-esteem questionnaire to include items about whether they see themselves as a person of worth and whether they think they have good qualities. So a questionnaire that included these kinds of items would have good face validity. The finger-length method of measuring self-esteem, on the other hand, seems to have nothing to do with self-esteem and therefore has poor face validity. Although face validity can be assessed quantitatively—for example, by having a large sample of people rate a measure in terms of whether it appears to measure what it is intended to—it is usually assessed informally.
Face validity is at best a very weak kind of evidence that a measurement method is measuring what it is supposed to. One reason is that it is based on people’s intuitions about human behavior, which are frequently wrong. It is also the case that many established measures in psychology work quite well despite lacking face validity. The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) measures many personality characteristics and disorders by having people decide whether each of over 567 different statements applies to them—where many of the statements do not have any obvious relationship to the construct that they measure. Another example is the Implicit Association Test, which measures prejudice in a way that is nonintuitive to most people (see How Prejudiced Are You?).
How Prejudiced Are You?
The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is used to measure people’s attitudes toward various social groups. The IAT is a behavioral measure designed to reveal negative attitudes that people might not admit to on a self-report measure. It focuses on how quickly people are able to categorize words and images representing two contrasting groups (e.g., gay and straight) along with other positive and negative stimuli (e.g., the words “wonderful” or “nasty”). The IAT has been used in dozens of published research studies, and there is strong evidence for both its reliability and its validity (Nosek, Greenwald, & Banaji, 2006). 1 You can learn more about the IAT—and take several of them for yourself—at the following website: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit.
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