Compare methods

	Lawshe Content Validity Ratio	Behaviorally Anchored Rating Scales
Field	Organizational Behavior	Organizational Behavior
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1975	1963
Originator	Charles H. Lawshe	Patricia Cain Smith & L. M. Kendall
Type	Quantitative content-validity index from expert ratings	Behaviorally anchored performance-rating scale construction
Seminal source	Lawshe, C. H. (1975). A quantitative approach to content validity. Personnel Psychology, 28(4), 563-575.	Smith, P. C., & Kendall, L. M. (1963). Retranslation of expectations: An approach to the construction of unambiguous anchors for rating scales. Journal of Applied Psychology, 47(2), 149-155.
Aliases	CVR, Content Validity Ratio, Lawshe Method, Content Validity Index	BARS, Behavioral Expectation Scales, Smith-Kendall Scales, Behaviorally Anchored Scales
Related	3	3
Summary	The Lawshe content validity ratio (CVR) is a simple, quantitative method for judging whether the items of a test or measure actually represent the content they are meant to cover, based on the agreement of a panel of subject-matter experts. Charles Lawshe introduced it in 1975 to address a gap in personnel testing: content validity had long been treated as a matter of judgment with no number attached, leaving practitioners unable to defend item retention decisions objectively. Lawshe's insight was to ask experts a focused question, is this item essential, useful but not essential, or not necessary, and to convert the proportion who call an item essential into a ratio that ranges from minus one to plus one. Items whose CVR exceeds a critical value tied to panel size are retained, and the average CVR of retained items gives a content validity index for the whole instrument. The method's clarity made it a durable standard in test development. It is especially common in human resources, nursing, and health-measure validation.	Behaviorally anchored rating scales (BARS) are performance-appraisal instruments whose scale points are defined by concrete examples of job behavior rather than by vague adjectives like 'good' or 'excellent.' Patricia Cain Smith and L. M. Kendall introduced the method in 1963 with their technique of retranslation of expectations, a procedure for constructing unambiguous behavioral anchors. The core problem they tackled is that ordinary rating scales leave raters to guess what each numerical point means, so that one supervisor's 4 is another's 2, fatally undermining reliability and fairness. BARS solves this by attaching specific behavioral descriptions, drawn from critical incidents and vetted by independent expert judges, to each level of each performance dimension. The construction process is deliberately participatory and quantitative, which both improves measurement and builds rater understanding. BARS became one of the most influential and widely studied formats in performance appraisal.