  Quantitative spectroscopy of molecular hydrogen has generated substantial
demand, leading to the accumulation of diverse elementary-process data
encompassing radiative transitions, electron-impact transitions,
predissociations, and quenching. However, their rates currently available are
still sparse and there are inconsistencies among those proposed by different
authors. In this study, we demonstrate an experimental validation of such
molecular dataset by composing a collisional-radiative model (CRM) for
molecular hydrogen and comparing experimentally-obtained vibronic populations
across multiple levels. From the population kinetics of molecular hydrogen, the
importance of each elementary process in various parameter space is studied. In
low-density plasmas (electron density $n_\mathrm{e} \lesssim
10^{17}\;\mathrm{m^{-3}}$) the excitation rates from the ground states and
radiative decay rates, both of which have been reported previously, determines
the excited state population. The inconsistency in the excitation rates affects
the population distribution the most significantly in this parameter space. On
the other hand, in higher density plasmas ($n_\mathrm{e} \gtrsim
10^{18}\;\mathrm{m^{-3}}$), the excitation rates \textit{from} excited states
become important, which have never been reported in the literature, and may
need to be approximated in some way. In order to validate these molecular
datasets and approximated rates, we carried out experimental observations for
two different hydrogen plasmas; a low-density radio-frequency (RF) heated
plasma ($n_\mathrm{e}\approx 10^{16}\;\mathrm{m^{-3}}$) and the Large Helical
Device (LHD) divertor plasma ($n_\mathrm{e}\gtrsim
10^{18}\;\mathrm{m^{-3}}$)... [continued]
