External Validity and the Research Process: A Comment on the Calder/Lynch Dialogue

A series of five articles about external validity and gen-eralizability has appeared in the Journal of Consumer Research in recent years, constituting a dialogue between Calder, Phillips, and Tybout (1981, 1982, 1983) on the one hand, and Lynch (1982, 1983) on the other. That dialogue has attracted much attention in the consumer research field. The two sets of authors have raised many important issues. They apparently disagree sharply on some of them. They are to be congratulated, we feel, both for raising the con-sciousness of the field on these important matters and for keeping their dialogue from deteriorating into rancorous, ad hominem "cheap shots. " 1 While Calder and Lynch apparently disagree on a number of important issues regarding external validity and the re-search process, they also apparently agree on a great deal