Research study 5.2: dr. sheffield is a clinical psychologist who specializes in treating pathological gambling. pathological gambling is defined as being unable to resist impulses to gamble. bothered by not having a good measure that he can give to clients to determine whether they are suffering from this condition, he creates a new measure of pathological gambling. the measure has 15 questions, and it takes 20 minutes to complete. to test his measure, dr. sheffield gives his measure to a group of people in gamblers anonymous (ga) and another group of people in alcoholics anonymous (aa). he finds that people in the ga group have higher scores on his new measure than people in the aa group. this procedure is known as a:

What Dr. Sheffield is doing is testing the validity of the psychological measurement of pathological gambling. The validity testing that he is engaging in is called criterion validity. Criterion-based validity is a type of validity where you test the constructed measurement's validity against a criterion that has been proven to have a relationship with the measured variable.

In this case, Dr. Sheffield's testing of his measurement on people who are in gambling anonymous vs. people who are in alcoholics anonymous and the subsequent result shows that his measurement can be used to measure the pathological gambling variable since high scorers for his measurement can be found only in the people who are in the gambling anonymous group.