Validating Surrogate Measures of Psychological Constructs: The Application of Construct Equivalence to Archival Data

Abstract

Archival data present opportunities to test important research questions. Unfortunately, archival data do not always include validated measures of the psychological constructs that may be of interest to researchers. In this article, the authors describe how the construct equivalence approach can be applied to organizational archival data to derive and empirically validate surrogate measures of psychological constructs. A step-by-step explanation of how to validate such measures, which includes the use of confirmatory factor analysis to examine the data from a multitrait-multimethod perspective, is described. This approach facilitates the use of organizational archives for research purposes.