Biodata

Biodata, or biographical data, are paper and pencil measures that ask respondents to reflect or report on their life experiences. Scores from biodata are typically used in conjunction with other employment measures for predicting individual performance in a given job. Biodata have been used across a wide range of occupations as an indicator of the likelihood of job success, where success may be defined as task-specific job performance, teamwork, or other organizationally relevant outcomes. Biodata can therefore be a useful tool for organizations seeking to examine job applicants' backgrounds in a consistent, transparent, and fair manner. The fundamental premise underlying the use of these measures is that past experience should be a reasonable predictor of future work behavior. That is, it is assumed that individuals shape their life experiences, and they are also shaped by these experiences. Given these processes are relatively continuous over time, having critical information about an individual's previous experiences should allow for making more accurate predictions about future behavior—even above and beyond predictions one could make from measures of cognitive ability, personality, motivation, and interests.

Biodata items can vary substantially in content and specificity. For instance, some items may be relatively personality oriented, making the underlying experiences of interest difficult to identify (e.g., “To what extent does your happiness depend on how things are going at work?”). On the other hand, they may be more situation specific or overt, making it relatively easier to identify the purpose of the item (e.g., “Approximately how many books have you read in the past three months?”). In all cases, however, biodata items require the respondent to recall and report their characteristics and experiences. Therefore, the usefulness of these items depends in part on the extent to which individuals are able to accurately perceive, store, and recall this information and their willingness to report it truthfully. It is known from the cognitive psychology literature that individuals vary widely in the efficiency and effectiveness of their memory storage and retrieval processes, and it is known from the organizational psychology literature that faking answers to items that have no right answer (such as biodata and personality items) is a serious concern in the employment setting.

In addition to items being covert or overt in nature, the underlying personal characteristics tapped by biodata instruments also vary widely across forms. Either implicitly or by design, biodata items typically reflect specific experiences tied to constructs such as ability, personality, motivation, interpersonal skills, and interests. In some cases, these items may be fairly pure measures of a given construct, but in other cases, the items may relate to several constructs. This clearly has implications for empirically examining and interpreting the underlying factor structure and reliability of biodata instruments. Both test-retest reliability and internal consistency (coefficient alpha) should be considered when examining biodata reliability, with test-retest reliability being more sensible when no strong factors exist in the measure.

Although biodata instruments vary widely in terms of many characteristics (e.g., content, length, scoring), [Page 1414]these measures have consistently been found to demonstrate criterion-related validity across occupations. Correlations between scores on these measures and indices of job performance (e.g., supervisor ratings) tend to be approximately .30. Furthermore, these measures have demonstrated incremental validity above and beyond measures of general cognitive ability and the five-factor model personality constructs (emotional stability, extraversion, openness to experience, agreeableness, conscientiousness). Thus, these assessments provide useful information regarding likely occupational success beyond that provided by measures of broad individual differences, themselves known to be valuable predictors of organizational behavior.

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