Discriminant Validity: What It Is and How to Assess It. Organizational Research Methods, in preparation (& Cho, E.)
The concept of discriminant validity is ambiguously defined and interpreted with various meanings in the literature. A key reason for this outcome is that the concept of discriminant validity was originally presented as a set of empirical criteria that can be assessed from multi-trait multi-method matrix (MTMM) but without a clear definition that would be applicable outside this particular context. Given that the datasets used by applied researchers rarely lend themselves to MTMM analysis, the need to assess discriminant validity in empirical research has led to introducing numerous techniques of which some have been introduced in an ad hoc manner and without rigorous methodological support. We review various definitions and techniques for discriminant validity and provide a generalized definition of discriminant validity as the correlation between latent variables estimated from two measurement scales. Thereafter, we review techniques that have been proposed for discriminant validity assessment, demonstrating some problems and equivalencies of these techniques that have gone unnoticed by prior research. We use Monte Carlo simulations to assess to compare the techniques and present a set of recommendations for applied researchers.