Last Updated on October 3, 2026 by Karl Thompson
Validity means that research gives a true and accurate picture of what it claims to measure or describe. A valid method gets close to the reality of people’s lives and behaviour. An invalid one gives a misleading picture, however neat and impressive the results look.
Validity is part of research design in Theory and Methods, which is assessed on Paper 1 and Paper 3 (mostly Paper 3). It is also one of the main evaluation points you can make about any research method, so you will need it in methods in context questions on Paper 1 as well.
What is validity in sociology?
In sociology, a valid piece of research is one that reflects what people really think, feel and do, and measures the thing the researcher says it is measuring. If a questionnaire claims to measure how much people trust the police but is really picking up how willing people are to say socially acceptable things to a stranger, it lacks validity.
Validity is different from reliability. Reliability is about whether a method gives consistent results when it is repeated, while validity is about whether those results are true. A method can be reliable without being valid, and the reliability post explains the difference.
As with many things in sociology, it makes sense to start with an example to illustrate the general meaning of the concept of validity:
When universities question whether or not BTECs really provide a measure of academic intelligence, they are questioning the validity of BTECs to accurately measure the concept of ‘academic intelligence’.
When academics question the validity of BTECs in this way, they might be suspicious that BTECs are actually measuring something other than a student’s academic intelligence; rather BTECs might instead actually be measuring a student’s ability to cut and paste and modify just enough to avoid being caught out by plagiarism software.
If this is the case, then we can say that BTECs are not a valid measurement of a student’s academic intelligence.
Validity and the positivist and interpretivist debate
Validity is one of the main points of disagreement between Positivists and Interpretivists.
Interpretivists put validity first. They want to understand the meanings people give to their own actions, and they argue that this needs methods that get close to people, such as unstructured interviews and participant observation. They are critical of quantitative methods such as questionnaires, because the researcher decides the categories and the answer options in advance. This means respondents can only say what the researcher has thought of, and the result can be a tidy set of numbers that does not match what people actually think. Respondents may also answer in the way they believe they ought to, or misunderstand the question, and the researcher has no way of knowing.
Positivists tend to put reliability and representativeness first. They use standardised, quantitative methods because they allow comparison and generalisation, even if this means giving up some depth.
HOWEVER, qualitative methods are not automatically valid. Participants who know they are being watched may change their behaviour, a researcher who becomes too close to the group can lose their objectivity, and in the end the findings depend on how one researcher interpreted what they saw and heard.
Which research methods are strong or weak on validity?
| Method | Why it can be valid | Why validity may be threatened |
|---|---|---|
| Questionnaires and structured interviews | Anonymous, self-completion questionnaires may encourage honest answers on sensitive topics | Closed questions impose the researcher’s categories. Respondents may lie, forget or misunderstand, and give answers that make them look good |
| Unstructured interviews | Rapport and open questions let respondents explain things in their own words and raise issues the researcher had not thought of | Interviewer bias, and respondents may still say what they think the interviewer wants to hear |
| Participant observation | Researchers see what people actually do rather than what they say they do | Overt researchers may change the behaviour they are studying (the Hawthorne effect), and researchers can go native |
| Laboratory experiments | Control over variables helps to show cause and effect | The setting is artificial, and participants who know they are being studied may behave differently from normal |
| Official statistics | Some are collected by official bodies using clear definitions | Interpretivists argue that statistics on social issues are the product of decisions by the people who record them. Some cases are never recorded at all |
Ecological validity
Ecological validity is a particular kind of validity. It asks whether the findings of a piece of research apply to behaviour in real-life settings, rather than only in the setting where the research was carried out. Laboratory experiments are usually criticised for low ecological validity because a laboratory is an unusual place to be. Observation in natural settings is generally stronger on this point.
Types of validity: how can sociologists assess the validity of measures and indicators?
Validity refers to the extent to which an indicator (or set of indicators) really measure the concept under investigation. There are five ways in which sociologists and psychologists might determine how valid their indicators are: face validity, concurrent validity, convergent validity, construct validity, and predictive validity.
This section is extension material. You do not need all five types to write a good evaluation point about validity, but they show you the technical side of the concept and they are useful for stretching an answer beyond the usual points.
There are a number of ways of testing measurement validity in social research:
Face validity
On the face of it, does the measure fit the concept? Face validity is simply achieved by asking others with experience in the field whether they think the measure seems to be measuring the concept. This is essentially an intuitive process.
Concurrent validity
To establish the concurrent validity of a measure, the researchers simply compare the results of one measure to another which is known to be valid (known as a ‘criterion measure’). For example with gamblers, betting accounts give us a valid indication of how much they actually win or lose, but wording of questions designed to measure ‘how much they win or lose in a given period’ can yield vastly different results. Some questions provide results which are closer to the hard-financial statistics, and these can be said to have the highest degree of concurrent validity.
Predictive validity
Here a researcher uses a future criterion measure to assess the validity of existing measures. For example we might assess the validity of BTECs as measurement of academic intelligence by looking at how well BTEC students do at university compared to A-level students with equivalent grades.
Construct validity
Here the researcher is encouraged to deduce hypotheses from a theory that is relevant to the concept. However, there are problems with this approach as the theory and the process of deduction might be misguided!
Convergent validity
Here the researcher compares her measures to measures of the same concept developed through other methods. Probably the most obvious example of this is the Crime Survey for England and Wales (called the British Crime Survey, or BCS, until 2012) as a test of the ‘validity’ of police recorded crime statistics. The Crime Survey shows us that different crimes, as measured by police recorded crime, have different levels of convergent validity – vehicle theft is relatively high, vandalism is relatively low, for example.
Using validity in the exam
Don’t just write that a method is “not valid”. Explain what it fails to give a true picture of, and why. For example, with a questionnaire, you might say that closed questions force respondents to choose from answers the researcher has decided on, so the results may not reflect what they really think. Then link the point to the research context in the question, and to whether the researcher is taking a Positivist or an Interpretivist approach.
Remember to keep validity and reliability separate. A common mistake is to use the two words as if they mean the same thing.
Source
Bryman (2016) Social Research Methods
Theory and Methods A Level Sociology Revision Bundle
If you like this sort of thing, then you might like my Theory and Methods revision notes bundle – specifically designed to get students through the theory and methods sections of A level sociology papers 1 and 3.
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Signposting
This post has been written primarily for students studying theory and methods, as part of the AQA’s A-Level Sociology course.
Validity goes hand in hand with reliability, and the two are usually evaluated together. The disagreement between Positivists and Interpretivists over which matters more is covered in Positivism and Interpretivism in Sociology. For the other half of the research design, see sampling, and for the whole topic see the research methods hub.
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