A meta‐analytic investigation of the impact of interview format and degree of structure on the validity of the employment interview*
verifiedmedium profile · Journal of Occupational Psychology · 1988
Wiesner, Willi H.; Cronshaw, Steven F.
How this was studied
A meta-analytic synthesis — it pools many primary studies rather than running a single design, so there is no single-study diagram.
What this article reports
The findings we extracted from this work, normalized into Principia’s relationship form (X → Y). Each feeds the synthesized models below.
unstructured employment interviews → task performance
Models this article informs
The meta-analytic priors this article contributes evidence to — its place in the broader synthesis.
structured employment interviews predicts task performance
unstructured employment interviews predicts task performance
In the authors’ words
The article’s own abstract.
A meta‐analysis of the employment interview was carried out to investigate the impact of interview format (individual vs. board interviews) and interview structure (unstructured vs. structured) on the validity of interviews. A thorough review of the unpublished and published literature worldwide yielded 150 usable validity coefficients for the meta‐analysis. Contrary to the predominantly pessimistic views of previous researchers, the interview was found to be a generally good selection instrument. These findings suggest that the ‘received doctrine’ of interview invalidity is false. However, interview structure moderated predictive validity coefficients to a considerable extent. In fact, structured interviews produced mean validity coefficients twice as high as unstructured interviews. Although considerable variance in structured interviews remained unaccounted for after adjustment for statistical artifacts, all of the variation in observed validity coefficients for unstructured interviews was accounted for. It was concluded that a number of social psychological processes examined in previous interview research would have little effect in moderating the validity coefficients of the unstructured interview. The results also suggest that higher validity coefficients are associated with more reliable interviews and the use of formal job‐analytic information in developing interview questions. Implications for research and practice in personnel psychology are explored.
What the literature says about it
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