Moderators of the Tailored Adaptive Personality Assessment System Validity
Abstract
The Army is conducting an evaluation of a new measure of personality, the Tailored Adaptive Personality Assessment System (TAPAS), for possible use to augment the predictive power of the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) for personnel selection and classification decisions. Historically, the assessment of ones personality has been plagued by inauthentic responding such as faking good and unmotivated responding. It is possible that some individuals do not honestly do their best as they answer TAPAS items or attempt to game TAPAS and employ a response strategy that leads to invalid and misleading scores. As a result of such aberrant responding, estimates of the validity of TAPAS for predicting important outcome variables may be biased toward zero. The present research examined the effects of such aberrant responding on the criterion-related validity of TAPAS and, in addition, evaluated whether individuals engaging in aberrant responding gained any advantage over those who responded in accordance with the test instructions. The item response theory (IRT) method developed for identifying random responding was found to be highly effective with both nonadaptive and adaptive tests and power was somewhat lower, but better than expected for detecting strategic responding in simulation studies. In addition, when statistical response flags and indices designed to detect unusually fast and patterned responding were applied to operational TAPAS data, only relatively small proportion so of examinees were flagged. When TAPAS validities were reexamined excluding those respondents, small proportions of the effects on criterion-related validities were minimal, suggesting that aberrant responding has little effect on utility.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jul 01, 2017
- Accession Number
- AD1037318
Entities
People
- Christopher Nye
- Frtiz Drasgow
- Leonard A. White
- Oleksandr S. Chernyshenko
- Stephen Stark
Organizations
- Drasgow Consulting Group