title: "Face validity" is not a legitimate type of validity evidence!
abstract: The American Journal of Surgery (AJS) is a long-standing leader among surgery publications and has published high-quality research dating back to 1926. To preserve AJS's reputation, it is necessary to identify issues that may affect the journal, and subsequently the broader field of surgery, in a negative way, and attempt to resolve those issues. To that end, I would like to address the issue of citing "face validity" as a type of validity evidence. In a review of AJS articles since 2006, 30 articles have consisted of researchers citing face validity as part of their validity evidence. This is problematic because validity theorists (scholars who dedicate their careers to studying validity and what constitutes acceptable types of validity evidence) have universally agreed there is no such thing as "face validity". Thus, the purpose of this article is to encourage surgeons to study recent, and authoritative, works on validity theory, so they can better articulate the trustworthiness of their research findings and be more informed consumers of research.
authors.affiliation: North Carolina State University, Clinical Sciences, 1060 William Moore Dr., Raleigh, NC 27607, USA. Electronic address: kdroyal2@ncsu.edu.
authors.forename: Kenneth
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Royal
mesh_terms: D035843:Biomedical Research; D013502:General Surgery; D006801:Humans; D010506:Periodicals as Topic; D015203:Reproducibility of Results
keywords: Face validity; Medical education; Research reporting; Surgery; Validity