Looks like the July 2007 edition of The Industrial-Organizational Psychologist (a.k.a., TIP, SIOP’s quarterly magazine) is online, including my column that I co-author with Marcus Dickson. The column is “Good Science Good Practice” and in each issue we try to highlight research that bridges the gap between scientists and practitioners. Preferably without resorting to cage matches. This time we talk about things we saw at the 2007 SIOP conference in New York. Here’s a smidge:
Later in the conference a panel of other experts on employment testing gathered and discussed how certain scientific and methodological advances in test validation were faring in the field. Specifically, the symposium, entitled “Validity Generalization in the Workplace,†discussed alternatives to traditional test validation strategies that are widely accepted as useful and acceptable by researchers and other experts in the testing industry, but which are sometimes regarded as inscrutable or untested (pardon the pun) by others. Examples included job component validity, validity transportability, and meta analysis. The panelists, all of whom use these validation tactics in their everyday work, explained that they are most often useful and necessary when traditional approaches like criterion-related validation are impossible due to time constraints or the lack of enough incumbents to achieve adequate statistical power for the required procedures.
The incumbents were also forthcoming with many of the sometimes irritating realities of this kind of research, including the fact that one must be able to replicate job analysis procedures for transportability studies and that there was still a certain amount of legal risk involved in these processes given that the courts have yet to build up a strong history of neither support nor opposition for these approaches despite their widespread acceptance among academics and other science-minded practitioners. The presenters also sheepishly provided a somewhat unsatisfying answer to the question of “how close is close enough†when it comes to comparing the components or requirements of two jobs for purposes of transporting validity: “That’s up to you to decide.†It seems there is still a place for professional judgment in the brave new world of alternative validation approaches.
Also of interest for those you who get the print version of TIP, they’ve changed the cover format to include photographs on the covers. A welcome change, and I since photography has become a hobby of mine I’m hereby making it my life-long goal to get a photograph on the cover. That way I’ll be both inside and outside the magazine, which will pretty much make me unstoppable.
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