The Situational Specificity of Validities: Correcting for Statistical Artifacts Does Not Always Reduce the Trans‐Situational Variability of Correlation Coefficients

Validity generalization research suggests that much of the variability in validity coefficients is due to statistical artifacts, such as sampling error. Correcting for these artifacts usually reduces the trans‐situational variability in validity coefficients, but the reverse can happen. Conditions under which corrections for statistical artifacts can increase the variability in validity coefficients are described, examples of meta‐analyses reporting larger corrected than observed variance in validity are cited, and implications for the situational specificity of validity coefficients are discussed. In general, the true variability in validity coefficients based on large samples is often larger than the observed variability in test validities.