Why is validity important in research?
First of all I am going to give a definition of the word validity. One defintion of validity is the state or quality of being valid; to question the validity of the arguement. (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/validity).
Now I am going to explain a bit about what validity is. Validity is the extent to which a test measures what it claims to measure. It is vital for a test to be valid in order for the results to be accurately applied and interpreted. (http://psychology.about.com/od/researchmethods/f/validity.htm).
Now I am going to answer the question. Validity is the power of deduction. Validity is important in research because without it your results are meaningless and people would have wasted a great deal of time collecting and analysing the data.
There are three different types of validity; content, criterion-related and construct validity. (http://www.txdirector.com/tf399724.tip.html). This is important because the three different types of validity are used in different researchs and one may be valid to one research but may not be valid in the next. Content validity relies on judgements which is different to criterion-related valdity, which relies on statistical analyses and contsruct validity concentrates on understading what is being measured, it does this by examining the relationship between constructs. (http://www.txdirector.com/tf399724.tip.html).
Validity is important in Psychology because you have to be able to use the experiements outside of Psychology as well as in the subject. Validity is also impiortant in Psychology because people have to know that the results were valid as well as reliable as they will have to trust the results that they are given as they may use the results to do experiments and they may go and check the results that have been done. The results have to be valid as they may be used outside of the field of Psychology, so if they are not valid then it may gave Psychology a bad name and people may not trust them anymore and they may not be able to get any more funding to do more experiments or research as people will not be able to relay on them and they may be not believe in their work.
Here is where I got some of my information from. I found some of the sites quite interesting: