Hostname: page-component-cb9f654ff-r5d9c Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-08-29T04:47:04.943Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Synthetic Validity: A Great Idea Whose Time Never Came

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 January 2015

Kevin R. Murphy
Kevin R. Murphy*
Affiliation:
The Pennsylvania State University
*
E-mail: krm10@psu.edu, Address: Department of Psychology, Pennsylvania State University, Moore Building, University Park, PA 16802
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Synthetic validity is very much like monogamy. It is an idea that is universally admired but not widely practiced. The concept of synthetic validity has been around for almost 60 years (Lawshe, 1952) and it is described in virtually every testing and measurement book and every industrial and organizational (I-O) psychology textbook I have ever read. I still vividly remember my undergraduate Psychological Testing professor dismissing synthetic validity as “made-up validity.” I thought he was wrong then, and I still do. Nevertheless, it is worth asking why synthetic validity studies are so rare.

Information

Type
Commentaries
Information
Industrial and Organizational Psychology , Volume 3 , Issue 3 , September 2010 , pp. 356 - 359
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology 2010 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Guion, R. M. (2006). Still learning. The Industrial-Organizational Psychologist, 44, 83–86.Google Scholar
Johnson, J. W., Steel, P., Scherbaum, C. A., Hoffman, C. C., Jeanneret, P. R., & Foster, J. (2010). Validation is like motor oil: Synthetic is better. Industrial and Organizational Psychology: Perspectives on Science and Practice, 3, 305–328.Google Scholar
Lawshe, C. H. (1952). Employee selection. Personnel Psychology, 6, 31–34.Google Scholar
Murphy, K., & Shiarella, A. (1997). Implications of the multidimensional nature of job performance for the validity of selection tests: Multivariate frameworks for studying test validity. Personnel Psychology, 50, 823–854.Google Scholar
Murphy, K. R. (2009a). Content validation is useful for many things, but validity isn't one of them. Industrial and Organizational Psychology: Perspectives on Science and Practice, 2, 453–464.Google Scholar
Murphy, K. R. (2009b). Validity, validation and values. The Academy of Management Annals, 3, 421–461.Google Scholar
Murphy, K. R., Dzieweczynski, J. L., & Yang, Z. (2009). Positive manifold limits the relevance of content-matching strategies for validating selection test batteries. Journal of Applied Psychology, 94, 1018–1031.Google Scholar
Ree, M. J., Carretta, T. R., & Earles, J. A. (1998). In top-down decisions, weighting variables does not matter. A consequence of Wilks' Theorem. Organizational Research Methods, 1, 407–420.Google Scholar
Ree, M. J., & Earles, J. A. (1991). Predicting training success: Not much more than g . Personnel Psychology, 44, 321–332.Google Scholar
Ree, M. J., & Earles, J. A. (1992). Intelligence is the best predictor of job performance. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 1, 86–89.Google Scholar
Schmidt, F. L., & Hunter, J. E. (1998). The validity and utility of selection methods in personnel psychology: Practical and theoretical implications of 85 years of research findings. Psychological Bulletin, 124, 262–274.Google Scholar
Tett, R. P., Jackson, D. N., & Rothstein, M. (1991). Personality measures as predictors of job performance: A meta-analytic review. Personnel Psychology, 44, 703–742.Google Scholar