Big Data and the Challenge of Construct Validity

One important issue not highlighted by Guzzo, Fink, King, Tonidandel, and Landis (2015) is that simply establishing construct validity will be significantly more challenging with big data than ever before. One needs to only look as far as the other social sciences analyzing big data (e.g., communica...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inIndustrial and organizational psychology Vol. 8; no. 4; pp. 521 - 527
Main Authors Braun, Michael T., Kuljanin, Goran
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published New York, USA Cambridge University Press 01.12.2015
Subjects
Behavior
Big Data
Commentaries
Datasets
Internet
Researchers
Validation studies
Validity
Variables
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Summary:One important issue not highlighted by Guzzo, Fink, King, Tonidandel, and Landis (2015) is that simply establishing construct validity will be significantly more challenging with big data than ever before. One needs to only look as far as the other social sciences analyzing big data (e.g., communications, economics, industrial engineering) to observe the difficulty of making valid claims as to what measured variables substantively “mean.” This presents a significant hurdle in the application of big data to organizational research questions because of the critical importance of demonstrating validity in the organizational sciences as highlighted by Guzzo et al.
ISSN:1754-9426
1754-9434
DOI:10.1017/iop.2015.77