How validity became theory: professional reputation and technical malfeasance at the APA Committee on Test Standards, 1950–1954

All scientific fields exhibit contested boundaries between valid and invalid knowledge. This paper examines how demarcation processes change as fields expand. Disciplinary fields committed to rapid growth encounter conditions under which comparably legitimate elites with incompatible perspectives have conflicting views of professional authority; one solution to this problem is to find a way to recognize both views as legitimate. I consider an exemplary case of this process: the work of the 1950–4 APA Committee on Test Standards on the Technical Recommendations for Psychological Tests and Diagnostic Technique s to develop the notion of construct validation. Negotiations between two psychologists (psychometrician and committee chair Lee Cronbach and social psychologist and former APA president Gordon Allport) led to a compromise between two competing uses of psychological tests: as literary objects accreting reputation and influence for psychological theories, and as technical objects susceptible to analysis using comparative statistical methods. The resulting notion of construct validation minimizes conflicts between theories and methods in part by limiting the ethical scope of both forms of knowledge.