1 Assessing Situational Judgment with a Structured Interview: Construct Validity and Adverse Impact Frederick P. Morgeson Talya N. Bauer Donald M. Truxillo Michael A. Campion Slides are available at: In F. L. Oswald (Chairperson), Advances and Construct Validity Issues in Situational Judgment Tests. Symposium conducted at the 18th Annual Conference of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, Orlando, FL.

2 Use of Situational Judgment Tests  Become much more prominent  Typical format – Paper & Pencil – Multiple choice Q&A – Different ways to score  Good criterion, unknown construct validity – McDaniel et al. (2001) » Criterion-related validity (ρ =.34) » Relationships with ‘g’ (ρ =.46)  Group differences/adverse impact?

3 Alternatives to Situational Judgment  Different ways to assess individual judgment in hypothetical situations  Situational interview questions – Ask applicants to describe how they would respond to hypothetical situations likely to face in future – An alternative way to assess situational judgment  Current research used a situational interview – Assess construct validity and group differences

4 Method  Sample – Year 1: 1,023 applicants – Year 2: 2,295 applicants – Approximately 60% male – 4% Hispanic & 3% African-American  Selection procedure – Part 1: Written test battery – Part 2: Assessment center

5 Method  More detail about situational interview – Longer and more involved; emphasized “situational” character – Utilized follow-up questions to challenge candidate and make situation more complex/difficult – Example question

6 Method  Written test battery – All measures demonstrated adequate reliability  Assessment center scoring – All exercises rated by multiple assessors on multiple dimensions; high interrater and internal consistency reliability – Averaged across dimension to create exercise score  Analyses – Correlations & d’s

7 Discussion  Conclusions – As implemented, this type of situational judgment test appears to be independent of ‘g’ – No group differences (may actually help?) – Might be a useful way to assess situational judgment  Caveats – Is this comparable to a written situational judgment test? – Are situational judgment tests simply a measurement method?