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Reproducibility is not construct validity: LLM measurement of institutionally situated communication

arXiv 2609.19866 ↗First posted 17 Sep 2026cs.AI cs.CL cs.CYcited by 1

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Abstract (arXiv)

High annotation reproducibility does not necessarily imply that an LLM-inferred measure captures the construct it is intended to measure. We test this distinction using a dataset from the European Commission's AI Act consultation, linking structured survey responses to free-text consultation submissions from the same stakeholders. LLM annotations of consultation submissions are highly reproducible (intraclass correlations > 0.99), yet show limited convergence with survey-reported measures of the nominal construct they were intended to approximate. Divergence between survey-and LLM-inferred text-based measures varies systematically across stakeholder groups: business associations express greater concern about AI risks in text-based consultations than in survey responses (=g = +1.0), whereas public authorities and several nonbusiness groups show smaller or negative divergences. Divergences between scores suggest positive spatial autocorrelation across European countries (Moran's I = 0.347, p = 0.036), indicating that stakeholders from neighboring countries tend toward more similar text-based stances towards AI safety concerns. Despite divergence, survey-reported concerns remain strongly associated with support for explainability across all divergence levels. These results demonstrate that LLM annotation reproducibility can coexist with poor construct correspondence and motivate validation procedures that distinguish reproducibility, construct validity, and communication context variation when LLMs are used as measurement instruments.

Key facts. Cited by 1 paper in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 10 of its 39 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 17 Sep 2026.

Builds on

10 of 39 references.

References · 10

  1. 2023ChatGPT Outperforms Crowd-Workers for Text-Annotation Taskscited by 870
  2. 2025Measuring what Matters: Construct Validity in Large Language Model Benchmarkscited by 119
  3. 2018How to Make Causal Inferences Using Textscited by 59
  4. 2020Text and Causal Inference: A Review of Using Text to Remove Confounding from Causal Estimatescited by 59
  5. 2025Large Language Model Hacking: Quantifying the Hidden Risks of Using LLMs for Text Annotationcited by 50
  6. 2018Challenges of Using Text Classifiers for Causal Inferencecited by 33
  7. 2023Positioning Political Texts with Large Language Models by Asking and Averagingcited by 13
  8. 2025From Prompts to Constructs: A Dual-Validity Framework for Large Language Model Research in Psychologycited by 9
  9. 2025A validity-guided workflow for robust large language model research in psychologycited by 8
  10. 2026What is Safety? Corporate Discourse, Power, and the Politics of Generative AI Safetycited by 1

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