Construct · 6 fields · 7 citations
One name. Different field. Different construct. One map.
● jingle · one name, six constructs Nearest construct by meaningvaliditycompare the meaningsEvery construct on the map is compared with every other by the meaning of its definitions, and the closest one is surfaced here. The nearest construct to construct is validity.
Hold this as a prompt, not a verdict. Two constructs sitting close in meaning is a reason to read them side by side and decide for yourself whether they are one idea under two names. It is not proof that they are. Compare the meanings in the Collider.
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A postulated attribute of people, assumed to be reflected in test performance, Cronbach and Meehl's 1955 definition, written to say what a test could be valid for when no criterion exists. A construct earns its standing from the nomological network around it: the lawful relations between it, other constructs, and observables. This is the meaning in which resilience, trust, and engagement are constructs, and the meaning this whole site is about. It is inferred, never observed, and it is only as real as the network holds.[1]
MacCorquodale and Meehl drew the line in 1948: an intervening variable is a convenient summary of observed relations and asserts nothing beyond them, while a hypothetical construct asserts the existence of something (a process, an entity) not reducible to the observations. The distinction is about ontological commitment. Cronbach and Meehl's psychometric construct, seven years later, inherited the second reading, which is why validity in that tradition is about whether the thing is really there.[2]
A distinction a person uses to make sense of their world (good–bad, safe–dangerous, like-me–not-like-me) organized into a personal system that anticipates events. Kelly's 1955 theory made the person the scientist and the construct their instrument; the repertory grid elicits an individual's constructs rather than scoring them on a researcher's. Here a construct belongs to the person being studied, not to the person doing the studying.[3]
Something that exists because people collectively treat it as existing (money, marriage, a diagnosis, a race category) and that would not exist, or not in that form, without the treating. Berger and Luckmann's 1966 account made the mechanism explicit: habit becomes institution, institution is handed on as objective reality. Hacking's later question, the social construction of what?, is the field's own jingle check: the phrase is applied to ideas, to people, and to things, and it means something different in each case.[4][5]
A learned pairing of form and meaning (from a single word to an idiom to an abstract pattern like the ditransitive) that speakers store and combine. Goldberg's construction grammar treats the whole of a language as an inventory of such pairings, with no separate module for syntax. The word is construction rather than construct, but the two collide constantly in searches and in cross-disciplinary reading.[6]
An artificially assembled piece of DNA (a vector carrying a gene, a promoter, a reporter) built to be put into a cell. When the parts come from different genes or species the result is a chimeric construct, a phrase in routine use for decades. This is the only meaning on the page in which a construct is a physical object you can pipette, and the only one in which "chimera" is a technical term rather than a metaphor.[7]
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