DOWNLOAD THE WORKSHOP POSTER HERE: Bordeaux Workshop Poster

Workshop on Challenges to Translating Validity in Psychiatric Research, Bordeaux 2021:

“The question of whether psychiatry can be a scientific discipline has been focused around the concept of validity since the 1950s. Yet, there have been different understandings of what it means to ascertain validity. This has sparked vivid methodological debates, whose history, philosophy, and practical implications on psychiatric research this seminar series examines.

On the one side, a lot of attention has been given to the promises and limitations of searching for consensus on protocols, operationalization, and standardized vocabularies in biological psychiatry. Such frameworks and tools of unification proliferated with the internationalization of psychiatric research in the second half of the twentieth century. On the other side, in research practices, validity has mainly been used as an “umbrella term” to refer to a diversity of procedures and measurements. This has raised the question to what extent the plethora of commonly used so-called validator criteria refer to the same “construct.”

This problem has become even more apparent when results are extrapolated and compared across contexts and languages. We are tackling these questions from various perspectives to examine how validity has been conceptualized and translated within psychiatric research.”

Lara Keuck (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science): Reframing Extrapolation as a Problem of Scope Validity

Catherine Belzung  (Tours University, Inserm): Animal Models in Psychiatry: Current Challenges

Lara Huber (Universität Kiel): Finding Your Way Through a Maze: How Adequacy Qualifies Validity – Lessons from Assessing Navigational Skills in Animals and Humans

Antonine Nicoglou (Tours University): Animal Model Tests and the Birth of Psychopharmacology

Cedric Brun (Bordeaux-Montaigne University): Inferential Stacking in Animal Models of Autism Spectrum Disorders: Weakness or Necessary Evil of Translational Neuropsychiatry?

Lisa Malich (Medizinische Universität Lübeck) : Translations of Correlational Validity in German Psychology of the 1950s

Alfred Freeborn (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science): Invalidating “True Schizophrenia”: Practices of Validation in British Schizophrenia Research in the 1970s

Judith Kaplan (University of Pennsylvania): Beyond Translation: Automatic and Artificial Approaches to Medical Meaning

Steeves Demazeux (Bordeaux-Montaigne University): Anxiety Entering the Lab