ABSTRACT
The ultimate goal of research is external validity, the ability to generalize relations between constructs observed in a research study to individuals and settings in the “real-world”. Threats to the external validity of experimental research often stem from the failure to consider characteristics of the individual, task or environment that moderate relations of interest in the real world. In this chapter, we consider characteristics of tax professional judgment and decision-making (JDM) tasks, the individuals who perform them, and the environments in which they are performed that might impact our ability to generalize findings from other JDM research to tax professional JDM or threaten the external validity of tax JDM research itself. Of course, each differentiated characteristic of the tax domain that raises a potential threat to external validity offers a corresponding opportunity to contribute to our understanding of tax JDM and the broader theories on which that understanding is based.
