Discriminant validity

In psychology, discriminant validity or divergent validity tests whether concepts or measurements that are not supposed to be related are, in fact, unrelated.

Campbell and Fiske (1959) introduced the concept of discriminant validity within their discussion on evaluating test validity. They stressed the importance of using both discriminant and convergent validation techniques when assessing new tests. A successful evaluation of discriminant validity shows that a test of a concept is not highly correlated with other tests designed to measure theoretically different concepts.