Briefly discuss the rational approach to biodata and what is actually being measured by biodata answers.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

More prudent and reasonable is the rational approach, including job analysis information to deduce hypotheses concerning success on the job under study and to seek from existing, previously researched sources either items or factors that address these hypotheses (Stokes & Cooper, 2001). Essentially, we are asking the following questions: “What do biodata mean?” “Why do past behaviors and performance or life events predict nonidentical future behaviors and performance?” (Breaugh, 2009; Dean & Russell, 2005). Brown and Campion (1994) found that recruiters deduced language and math abilities from education-related items, physical ability from sports-related items, and leadership and interpersonal attributes from items that reflected previous experience in positions of authority and participation in activities of a social nature. Nearly all items were thought to tell something about a candidate’s motivation. This rational approach has the advantage of enhancing both the utility of selection procedures and our understanding of how and why they work (cf. Mael & Ashforth, 1995). Moreover, it is probably the only legally defensible approach for the use of personal history data in employment selection. The rational approach to developing biodata inventories has proven fruitful beyond employment testing contexts. For example, Douthitt, Eby, and Simon (1999) used this approach to develop a biodata inventory to assess people’s degree of receptiveness to dissimilar others (i.e., general openness to dissimilar others). As an illustration, for the item “How extensively have you traveled?” the rationale is that travel provides for direct exposure to dissimilar others and those who have traveled to more distant areas have been exposed to more differences than those who have not. Other items include “How racially (ethnically) integrated was your high school?” and “As a child, how often did your parent(s) (guardian(s)) encourage you to explore new situations or discover new experiences for yourself?” However, even if the rational approach is used, the validity of biodata items can be affected by the life stage in which the item is anchored (Dean & Russell, 2005). In other words, framing an item around a specific, hypothesized developmental time (i.e., childhood vs. past few years) is likely to help applicants provide more accurate responses by giving them a specific context to which to relate their response.