Lee J. Cronbach

American educational psychologist, co-author (with Paul E. Meehl) of "Construct Validity in Psychological Tests" (Psychological Bulletin, 1955), the paper that introduced "construct validity" into the American Psychological Association's official validity framework and named the general problem of a test score not being "operationally defined" against the attribute it is meant to measure.

Matters to this vault as one half of the foundational citation behind claim-cronbach-meehl-1955-construct-validity-names-general-substitution-pattern — the general measurement-theory name this vault reaches for whenever a cheap scalar (a citation mean, a cosine score, a benchmark metric) is popularly treated as equivalent to the harder construct it only partially indexes. Messick's later "construct underrepresentation" and Xiao, Zhang, Lai & Liao's 2023 transfer of the vocabulary onto NLG metrics (see claim-xiao-et-al-2023-metriceval-transfers-measurement-theory-to-embedding-metrics) both build directly on this 1955 paper.

References

• claim-cronbach-meehl-1955-construct-validity-names-general-substitution-pattern
• claim-messick-construct-underrepresentation-names-scalar-too-narrow-for-construct
• claim-xiao-et-al-2023-metriceval-transfers-measurement-theory-to-embedding-metrics