Generalizability
Definition: Generalizability refers to how applicable a study’s results are to broader groups of people, settings, or situations they study and how the findings relate to this wider context (Frey, 2018; Kukull & Ganguli, 2012).
Related terms: Conceptual replication, External Validity, Opportunistic sampling, Sampling bias, WEIRD **Alternative definition:** Applying modified materials and/or analysis pipelines to new data or samples to answer the same hypothesis (different materials, different data) to test how generalizable the effect under study is (The Turing Way Community & Scriberia, 2021). **Related terms to alternative definition:** (if applicable): Conceptual Replication
References:
- Esterling, K., Brady, D., & Schwitzgebel, E. (2021). The Necessity of Construct and External Validity for Generalized Causal Claims. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/2s8w5.
- Generalizability. (2018). Generalizability. In B. B. Frey (Ed.), The SAGE Encyclopedia of Educational Research, Measurement, and Evaluation. SAGE Publications, Inc. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781506326139.n284
- Kukull, W. A., & Ganguli, M. (2012). Generalizability: The trees, the forest, and the low-hanging fruit. Neurology, 78(23), 1886–1891. https://doi.org/10.1212/WNL.0b013e318258f812
- LeBel, E. P., Vanpaemel, W., Cheung, I., & Campbell, L. (2017). A brief guide to evaluate replications. Meta-Psychology, 3. https://doi.org/10.15626/MP.2018.843
- Nosek, B. A., & Errington, T. M. (2020). What is replication? PLOS Biology, 18(3), e3000691. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3000691
- Yarkoni, T. (2020). The generalizability crisis. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1–37. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X20001685
Originally drafted by: Aoife O’Mahony
Reviewed by: Adrien Fillon, Matt Jaquiery, Tina Lonsdorf, Sam Parsons, Julia Wolska