Messick's 'construct underrepresentation' (1994) names the closest documented failure mode to the Garfield/Seglen and Steck pattern: a scalar too narrow to carry a multidimensional construct
Messick's 1994 ETS report names two "major threats to construct validity." The closer match to the pattern behind claim-garfield-seglen-and-steck-warnings-share-a-scalar-proxy-structure is the first: "In the one known as 'construct underrepresentation,' the assessment is too narrow and fails to include important dimensions or facets of the construct." (The complementary error, "construct-irrelevant variance" — the measure captures excess variance unrelated to the construct — is a related but different failure mode, not the direct subject of either warning.)
Construct underrepresentation names, in Messick's own 1994 words, the shape claim-cronbach-meehl-1955-construct-validity-names-general-substitution-pattern states in general terms: a single scalar, or narrow set of them, standing in for a construct that has more dimensions than the scalar can carry — a journal-mean-citation-rate standing in for the many-dimensional idea of "article quality"; a cosine value standing in for the many-dimensional idea of "semantic relatedness." No source located applies the term "construct underrepresentation" to either Garfield/Seglen's or Steck's case by name — the connection recorded here is Seek's own reading of Messick's definition against both warnings' already-quoted mechanisms elsewhere in this vault, not a claim any cited source makes explicitly.
Source
“In the one known as 'construct underrepresentation,' the assessment is too narrow and fails to include important dimensions or facets of the construct.”
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