THE PREDICTION OF RESEARCH COMPETENCE AND CREATIVITY FROM PERSONAL HISTORY, SMITH, 1961

THE PREDICTION OF RESEARCH COMPETENCE AND CREATIVITY FROM 

PERSONAL HISTORY 

WALLACE J. SMITH, LEWIS E. ALBRIGHT, J. R. GLENNON Standard Oil Company {Indiana) 

AND 

WILLIAM A. OWENS Purdue University 

Traditionally, two different research designs have been employed by investigators in their use of biographical data. These are directly analogous to the present-employee and follow-up methods of test validation. Exemplifying the latter are "weighted application blank" studies such as those of Kirchner and Dunnette (1957), Minor (1958), and Nay lor and Vincent (1959). In this approach, the pool of items for validation consists of those that appear on the employer's application form, filled out at the time of hiring by the criterion groups. Typically, the criterion used is job tenure, so that items are retained which discriminate the long and short tenure individuals. A validity coefficient based on the composite of surviving items would be a predictive validity estimate. The nature of the items retained, using this design, is almost always strictly demographic (age, marital status, number of dependents, etc.)

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