Tests Don't Measure Jobs:The Meaning of Content Validation

摘要

Murphy (2009) confounds content vali-dation with analysis of job relatedness.According to Murphy (and, to be fair, muchof the literature on employee selection),content validation involves a "detailedcomparison between the content of thetest and the content of the jobs" (p. 453).Tests don't measure jobs. They measureattributes of a job candidate—ones thatwe identify as important to performance onthe job. Content validation should apply tothe items constituting the measure of eachattribute and their relevance to and rep-resentativeness of the attribute in question(e.g., Haynes, Richard, & Kubany, 1995;Schriesheim, Cogliser, Scandura, Lankau, &Powers, 1999).