An Investigation into the Problem of Validity Generalization & Situational Specificity for Nuclear Power Plant Operations

The issues of situational specificity and validity generalization have shed new light on employment test validation in personnel psychology. Over the past six years Schmidt, Hunter and colleagues have accumulated an abundance of evidence supporting the use of validity generalization. The present study attempts to further investigate the issues of situational specificity and validity generalization for five nuclear power utilities using the CNS test battery. Using the Bayesian statistical procedure developed by Schmidt and Hunter (1977) the results indicated that neither the rejection of situational specificity or the inference of validity generalization was possible. However, further analyses indicated that the failure to reject situational specificity or infer validity generalization was due to one deviant validity coefficient. The addition of further validity studies will increase the likelihood of rejecting situational specificity and inferring validity generalization to a new nuclear power utility without the necessity of another validity study