Abstract
ABSTRACTThis study examines the stability of the response process and the rank-order of respondents responding to 3 personality scales in 4 different response conditions. Applicants to the University College of Teacher Education Styria (N = 243) completed personality scales as part of their college admission process. Half a year later, they retook the same personality scales in 1 of 3 randomly assigned experimental response conditions: honest, faking-good, or reproduce. Longitudinal means and covariance structure analyses showed that applicants' response processes could be partially reproduced after half a year, and respondents seemed to rely on an honest response behavior as a frame of reference. Additionally, applicants' faking behavior and instructed faking (faking-good) caused differences in the latent retest correlations and consistently affected measurement properties. The varying latent retest correlations indicated that faking can distort respondents' rank-order and thus the fairness of subsequent selection decisions, depending on the kind of faking behavior. Instructed faking (faking-good) even affected weak measurement invariance, whereas applicants' faking behavior did not. Consequently, correlations with personality scales—which can be utilized for predictive validity—may be readily interpreted for applicants. Faking behavior also introduced a uniform bias, implying that the classically observed mean raw score differences may not be readily interpreted.
Highlights
Faking is a type of response bias wherein respondents distort their responses to personality scale items to be viewed more favorably (McFarland & Ryan, 2000)
This study examines the stability of the response process and the rank-order of respondents responding to 3 personality scales in 4 different response conditions
This study examined four different response behaviors to personality scales: (a) a real-life admission testing situation, (b) a classic honest condition, (c) an instructed faking-good condition, and (d) a condition prompting incumbents to reproduce the response behavior from their admission testing setting
Summary
Faking is a type of response bias wherein respondents distort their responses to personality scale items to be viewed more favorably (McFarland & Ryan, 2000). Some scholars argue that these detrimental effects of faking are specific to laboratory studies, and that in real-life selection settings, effects of faking on applicants’ personality scale scores are negligible (e.g., Bradley & Hauenstein, 2006; Hogan, Barrett, & Hogan, 2007; Ones, Dilchert, Viswesvaran, & Judge, 2007) This view has been partially supported by a recent meta-analysis indicating only negligible to small differences between applicants and incumbents (0.11 d 0.45; Birkeland et al, 2006). Individual differences in respondents’ willingness to fake and its antecedents might be less pronounced in laboratory settings than in a real-life selection setting This raises the question of whether personality scales can be assumed to exhibit measurement invariance across various response conditions (faking good, honest, applicants, etc.). Faking behavior can theoretically affect personality scales on each level of measurement invariance, and personality test scores, which will be outlined in the following
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