Rationale and Research Evidence Supporting the Use of Content Validation in Personnel Assessment
Charles F. Sproule
Sproule & Associates
SIOP members may be interested in a new monograph description of content validation available at www.ipacweb.org.
Published January 2009 as a monograph of the International Personnel Assessment Council (IPAC) January 2009, the title is “Rationale and Research Evidence Supporting the Use of Content Validation in Personnel Assessment.”
This article makes a case for use of content validation in personnel assessment and reviews content validation legal requirements, professional standards, and principles for best practice. It describes why employers often rely on content validation. Content valid assessments tend to have lower levels of adverse impact and higher applicant acceptance than more general assessment methods.
Research evidence is presented to demonstrate that across a range of assessment methods, except for general ability tests, direct assessments have higher levels of criterion-related validity than indirect assessment methods. Tests with high content validity are more job specific and thus are more direct assessments. Research evidence is reviewed that demonstrates that more job-specific assessments have higher levels of criterion-related validity than less job-specific measures within the three most commonly used assessment methods (job knowledge tests, ratings of training and experience, and interviews). A strategy involving use of a variety of validation methods is recommended.
Roland Ramsay of Ramsay Corporation found the monograph a “very comprehensive review of content validation, well-researched and documented … an excellent resource useful to researchers and practitioners.”
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