The paper-and-pencil integrity test, which is used in industry as an employee selection device, has been largely developed outside the mainstream of psychological testing. The result has been that some testing programs have inadequately standardized testing conditions and/or other safeguards to ensure valid test results. Studies have shown that response distortion, or faking, is a problem with all types of tests, integrity tests being no exception. A correlation between the construct underlying integrity testing, such as the personality trait of conscientiousness, has yet to be investigated. The primary purpose of the present study was to determine how response distortion on integrity tests is affected by the instructions given by test administrators. Also, the connection between integrity tests and conscientiousness is examined. Finally, comparisons were made between currently published integrity tests/scales. Two hundred and forty-nine college students participated in this study by completing the following three integrity tests and two personality test scales: The London House Personnel Selection Inventory (London House Press, Inc., 1980); The Tescor Survey (Bullard, 1992); The Reid Report (Reid, 1967); The Value Orthodoxy Scale from The Jackson Personality Inventory (Jackson, 1976), and the Work Orientation Scale from the California Personality Inventory (Gough, 1985). The three integrity tests offer a variety of validation studies in support of their scales. Also, all three test publishers participated in a pre-publication review of the 1991 APA Task Force Report on integrity testing (Goldberg, Grenier, Guion, Sechrest, & Wing). Results show that responses were affected by instructions given by the administrator. For example, the analysis shows that in a job application situation, an applicant who believes a prospective employer is using an integrity test to identify undesirable applicants will tend to distort his/her responses on a theft scale to appear more favorable. Also for the theft scales, instructions to deliberately give false responses in a socially desirable way did not differ from a standard job applicant instruction set. Instructions emphasizing the ability of the tests to identify high integrity employees also did not differ from the standard instruction set's results. Results also show that conscientiousness is correlated with integrity test scales. Finally, the integrity tests and personality scales studied here are significantly correlated. Implications of these findings are discussed.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:pdx.edu/oai:pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu:open_access_etds-6133 |
| Date | 05 May 1995 |
| Creators | Searles, Nannette Shayne |
| Publisher | PDXScholar |
| Source Sets | Portland State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | Dissertations and Theses |
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