Generalizability

It refers to the extent to which one can generalize from the observations at hand to a universe of generalization. A researcher may wish to generalize a scale developed for use in personal interviews to other modes of data collection. Likewise, one may wish to generalize from a sample of items to the universe of items, from a sample of times of measurement to the universe of times of measurement, from a sample of observers to a universe of observers, and so on.