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Glossary
Whether the items on an assessment cover the full content domain of the construct being measured.
Content validity is the degree to which an assessment's items cover the full content domain of the construct it claims to measure. A burnout assessment with strong content validity would include items spanning exhaustion, cynicism, and reduced professional effectiveness — not just one of those dimensions.
Content validity is typically established by expert review: subject-matter experts evaluate whether the item set is representative, complete, and free of irrelevant content. Unlike statistical validity types, it relies on judgment rather than numbers — but it's foundational, because no amount of strong correlation data can rescue a scale that simply doesn't cover the territory.