Introduction
The term “nomological net” has been coined in the seminal paper by Cronbach and Meehl (1955) on construct validity (see also American Psychological Association 1954). Cronbach and Meehl introduced the idea of construct validity to validate theoretical attributes or qualities (i.e., constructs) for which there is no adequate criterion or which cannot be defined operationally, for example, personality traits or intelligence. The concept of construct validity as defined by Cronbach and Meehl did not only refer to measures of constructs, as did the earlier validity concepts of content validity or predictive validity, but intertwined the construct validation of measures with theory testing. According to construct validity theory, a construct is implicitly defined by its position in a network of other constructs that is deduced from theory and based on scientific laws – the “nomological net” (Cronbach and Meehl 1955). The laws in the nomological net or network (nomological:...
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Preckel, F., Brunner, M. (2017). Nomological Nets. In: Zeigler-Hill, V., Shackelford, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8_1334-1
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