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The Current State of Integrity Testing
On December 21, 2007 by Jamie Madigan
There's a pretty good article in a recent issue of Personnel Psychology by Christopher Berry, Paul Sackett, and Shelly Weismann called "A Review of Recent Developments in Integrity Test Research." It's a readable, relatively non technical read that you may want to check out if you use or think you may use integrity tests. Or if you want the short and skinny of it, there's currently a write-up on the front page of SIOP.org. But I can't figure out how to direct link to it so it may be gone by the time you read this.
You know integrity tests. They're those sneaky paper and pencil tests that have questions like this:
Q1 - Have you ever stolen anything?
a. What? No way, man.
b. Nuh-uh.
c. Nope, never, nope.
d. Why, I never! Look, you've made me drop my monacle!Q2 - No, seriously dude, have you ever stolen anything?
a. Oh, sure. All the time.
b. Yeah. I'm stealing this pencil right now!
c. No. Never. But tell me: Where do you keep the petty cash?
d. Well, just some office supplies. And millions in pension benefits.
Well, maybe not quite like that unless we're talking about the world's worst overt integrity test. The Berry, Sackett, and Weismann article gives you a much clearer picture of where things stand with integrity testing. Perhaps the section most fascinating to me was the one dealing with how item-level analysis of integrity tests revealed that they may be tapping something outside of the Big 5 personality taxonomy. Because anything that stretches us beyond that holy pentagram of personality research is potentially a good thing.
And integrity tests do appear to work, despite all the grumbling about them and people who say that folks will just lie when completing them. I've talked to a few people about this kind of thing, and beyond the typical biases surrounding personality testing there just seems to be this miasma surrounding integrity testing in particular. Maybe they just don't want applicants to think they're being treated like criminals, or maybe people just refuse to believe the test validities aren't affected much by faking (which they typically aren't.). Who knows. But it's very practical article that should probably be kept on hand for when it's needed.
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