Chapter 12: Psychological Assessment and Research in the Work Context

Introduction to Work Psychology

Introduction

• Psychological assessment and research are crucial for industrial and organisational (I-O) psychology as a science.

• Employees are considered human capital and must contribute value to the organisation.

• Psychological assessment is used in selection, training, employee development, career development, potential assessment, and diagnosing problem behaviour.

Psychological tests vs Assessments

• Psychological assessments use many methods (interviews, tests) for in-depth understanding of a person’s behavior, abilities and personality.

• Psychological tests are standardized tools which measure specific behaviors like intelligence or personality.

• Psychological assessments are broad and holistic, for in-depth understanding, while tests are specific and measure particular traits.

Definitions in Psychological Assessment

• Psychometrics: A subfield of industrial psychology focused on the scientific development of psychological tests and measurement techniques across various domains of human behaviour.

• Psychological Assessment: The scientific application of psychological tests and other techniques to gather relevant information about people's behaviour. It aims to understand and explain behaviour, solve specific problems, or make decisions about employee selection or career guidance.

• Psychological Test: Standardised methods designed to measure a sample of behaviour in a specific human behaviour domain, such as intelligence or personality.

• Gamification: The integration of game principles into non-game contexts.

• Virtual Reality: An interactive, real-life simulation where candidates engage all senses in a realistic environment.

Psychological Research

• Explore: Investigate when the researcher is uncertain about the extent of a problem or topic.

• Describe: Define the meaning of behaviour constructs and the development of psychological processes.

• Explain: Understand why certain behaviours occur by explaining concepts and their origins.

• Correlate: Determine the impact of different variables on each other.

• Prescribe: Determine if one variable predicts the outcome of another.

Approaches in Psychological Research

• Qualitative Research: Aims for an in-depth understanding of the underlying processes in human behaviour, such as motivation, feelings, thinking, attitudes, and perceptions.

  • Uses subjective methods like interviews, discourse analysis, story analysis, written words, artwork, poems, and historical information to analyse themes that give meaning to behaviour and thinking in specific contexts.

• Quantitative Research: Tests hypotheses about human behaviour.

  • Obtains information through structured, objective methods and generalises findings from research groups to the larger population using statistical indices.

Data-Collection Techniques in Research

• Observation: Recording and noting people’s behaviour in natural settings, including direct, contrived, mechanical, and indirect methods.

• Interviews: Using various interview types such as structured, unstructured, and focus groups.

• Experiments: Purposefully manipulating events, variables, or conditions and measuring the influence of these manipulations on subsequent behaviour.

• Psychological Questionnaires: Employing questionnaires, surveys, etc.

Data Analysing Techniques

Qualitative (explore/explain)

• Content Analysis: Determining what the data is and its meanings.

• Narrative Analysis: Reformulating stories based on context and experiences.

• Discourse Analysis: Making sense of natural discussions or written text.

• Framework Analysis: Searching for patterns, themes, and emerging issues.

• Grounded Theory: Fitting cases to a predefined statement about the population to create new theory.

Quantitative (measure/test hypothesis)

• Descriptive Statistics: Summaries describing the data, e.g., graphs and averages.

• Inferential Statistics: Probability testing and explaining the data, e.g., correlation.

Requirements for Effective Assessment and Research

• South Africa has legislation for the fair use of psychological assessments.

• Employment Equity Act (55 of 1998), Section 8: Psychological assessments must be reliable, valid, unbiased, and fairly applied to all employees.

• Reliability: The consistency of a measurement in similar circumstances or of a technique used by the same or different persons in the same or different situations.

  • Test-retest reliability

  • Alternate-form reliability

  • Split-half reliability

  • Kuder-Richardson & coefficient alpha

• Validity: The extent to which an assessment technique measures what it claims to measure and how well it measures the construct.

  • Face validity

  • Content validity

  • Criterion-related validity

  • Construct validity