In the "Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences", Preckel and Brunner (2017) nicely explained the concept of "Nomological Networks". They mentioned that a recent study analyzing 655 articles extracted from PsychINFO utilized the nomological network but, "Most of these publications, however, are not concerned with the concept of the nomological network per se but rather use this term to frame their research" (p.1). Their observation is invaluable to support our stance on the erroneous use of the concept of nomological network as they found that most of the authors are not focusing on the theoretical concept of nomological network but using this terminology just to present their research framework. This is, however, wrong and a clear misuse of the said concept. For instance, a recent study published in "Journal of Business Research" titled "Information systems capabilities value creation through circular economy practices in uncertain environments: A conditional mediation model" (Riggs et al., 2024) mentioned: "To the authors' knowledge, this article is the first to recognize CEP as these higher-order capabilities enabled by ISC that influence BP through the proposed network of relationships that form our nomological model" (p.3). This statement coincides with the observation of Preckel and Brunner (2017) because Riggs et al. (2024) picked the terminology i.e., nomological just to portray their research model, however, their research has nothing to do with the concept of nomological network per se.

In this text we will present an article titled "Student well-being in higher education: Scale development and validation with implications for management education" authored by Khatri et al. (2024) which was published in the "International Journal of Management Education" (SSCI Impact Factor 2022: 5.1; Scopus Q1; ABS). In the Study 4, the authors claimed to investigate the nomological validity and predictive strength of Student Well-being Scale (SWB) using the antecedents, decisions, and outcomes (ADO) framework presented by Paul and Benito (2018) (p.5). This assertion, however, is not true because Paul and Benito (2018) didn't construct a nomological network to investigate nomological validity anywhere in their paper. It seems that Khatri and his colleagues were confused and thought that any input/process/output model explores the nomological validity for the variables being entered into the model. This notion is not more than a mythology.

To establish nomological validity of a new construct, authors have to construct a nomological network as directed by Cronbach and Meehl (1955). This network provides a theoretical framework representing theoretical concepts and their relationships, an empirical framework determining the measurements and their relationships, and connections between the theoretical and empirical realms. To develop a nomological network, nomologicals should be identified and their relationship with the new construct should be conjectured based on theory. In contrast to the original concept of nomological validity, Khatri et al. (2024) mentioned:

"The integrity of our SWB scale further hinges on its nomological validity—essentially, its capacity to predict theoretically relevant outcomes in its domain. In pursuit of this, we integrated positive word-of-mouth (PWOM) as a consequential variable." (p.11,12).

Therefore, the authors hypothesized: "H1. SWB exerts a significantly positive influence on PWOM." (p.12).

Unfortunately, testing the relationship between SWB and PWOM doesn't reflect the nomological validity technique. The authors themselves mentioned that PWOM is an outcome/consequential variable. Following directions of Trochim et al. (2016), if we believe that SWB should theoretically predict PWOM, the validity would be termed as "predictive validity". Since nomological validity and predictive validity are two different types of validity, Khatri et al. (2024) confused both and thought that their proposed predictive relationship provides nomological validity for SWB which is intrinsically wrong and based on the lack of understanding of the theory of construct validity.

We wonder how often authors follow myths and urban legends due to their nescience, while editors of the journals are not able to understand and identify such prominent theoretical misconceptions. The analysis of Khatri et al. (2024) suggests that all the authors, reviewers, and editors were confused and indifferent to the concept of nomological validity and all were ignorant.

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References

Cronbach, L. J., & Meehl, P. E. (1955). Construct validity in psychological tests. Psychological Bulletin, 52(4), 281-302.

Preckel F., & Brunner M. (2017) Nomological nets. In Zeigler-Hill V., & Shackelford T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences. Cham: Springer.

Riggs, R., Felipe, C.M., Roldán, J.L., & Real, J.C. (2024). Information systems capabilities value creation through circular economy practices in uncertain environments: A conditional mediation model. Journal of Business Research, 175, 114526.

Trochim, W. M. K., Donnelly, J. P., & Arora, K. (2016). Research methods: The essential knowledge base. Boston, MA: Cengage Learning.

Update: On 15 March, 2024, Dr. Weng Mark Lim (3rd author) contacted us and justified their false beliefs about "nomological validity" by providing a piece from Wikipedia. He threatened us to initiate legal action if we will not take our criticism down.

Update: On 15 March, 2024, in another email, Dr. Weng Mark Lim (3rd author) only emphasized on the authenticity of Wikipedia. He also wished if we could have contacted the authors and re-initiated a peer review type process to get their views on the raised issues. In crux, they totally failed to talk about the actual issue we raised and cannot differentiate between nomological and predictive validities.

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