Development of a general solution to the problem of validity generalization.

Personnel psychologists have traditionally believed that employment test validities are situation specific. This study presents a Bayesian statistical model that is based on the alternate hypothesis that variation in validity outcomes from study to study for similar jobs and tests is artifactual in nature. Certain outcomes using this model permit validity generalization to new settings without carrying out a validation study of any kind. Where such generalization is not justified, the procedure is considered to provide an improved method of data analysis and decision making for the necessary situational validity study. Application to 4 distributions of empirical validity coefficients is presented to demonstrate the power of the model. (22 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)