Similarly, cognitive factors, such as situation framing or abstraction mismatches, may yield different codings. As in stability, the concern here is with the impact of coding on the possible classifications. Accuracy of coding is the extent to which preparing text for machine parsing conforms to the implemented processing model. Similarly, exceeding grammatical coverage could lead to spurious syntactic analyses. Semantic content analysis, as conceived here, should perform well in terms of stability and intercoder reliability precisely because it reduces the amount of coding humans must do.
Validity concerns the design of lexical classifiers and the interpretation of results.
Construct validity refers to the correlation of different predictors for the same category instance. In semantic content analysis, construct validity can span both the coding process and lexical classification. By retaining different surface statements, lexical interpretive semantics avoids overloading semantically canonical encodings - an inherent problem for semantic universalism. Thus, good coding practice seeks to retain alternate realizations of concepts while extending lexical classifiers to identify them. Hypothesis validity is the extent to which the text model yields classifications conforming to the substantive theory and the procedural theory that the analyst purports to test.