Situational Judgment Tests

Development of Situational Judgment Tests

Most modern versions of SJTs derive from the work of Stephen Motowidlo and his colleagues, which builds on Robert Sternberg's concept of tacit knowledge (i.e., job-relevant knowledge needed to accomplish everyday tasks that are usually not openly stated or part of any formal instruction) and improves the measurement of the concept by using job analyses to identify the types of judgments made on a specific job and to improve their content and face validity. The development process usually involves the identification of a set of work-related constructs that are targeted in an SJT. Job incumbents are asked to generate critical incidents or situations that require ability or expertise related to these constructs. Other job incumbents provide a set of possible actions that could be taken to resolve or improve the situations, and a third group, usually subject-matter experts, provide effectiveness ratings of each solution and judgments about the best and worst of the solutions. These ratings and judgments are analyzed and used to develop a final item and scoring key that is applied to the items. (Detailed examples of the SJT development process are provided in the references listed in Further Reading.)

Probably as a result of the job-relevant features of the test development process, studies have shown that respondents tend to have more favorable perceptions of SJTs compared with other types of employment tests, such as cognitive ability and personality tests, because they believe the tests are relevant to work situations and valid in predicting job performance. In addition to the evidence on the face validity of SJTs, there is increasing evidence that SJTs can produce substantial zeroorder and incremental criterion-related validities. However, unlike cognitive ability and personality measures, which have an extensive literature and large database, the empirical evidence on SJTs is much less established, and the theoretical or conceptual underpinnings of SJTs are much less understood.

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