The impact of job complexity and study design on situational and behavior description interview validity

Abstract

The primary purpose of this investigation was to test two key characteristics hypothesized to influence the validity of situational (SI) and behavior description (BDI) structured interviews. A meta-analysis of 54 studies with a total sample size of 5536 suggested that job complexity influences the validity of SIs, with decreased validity for high-complexity jobs, but does not influence the validity of BDIs. And, results indicated a main effect for study design across both SIs and BDIs, with predictive studies having 0.10 lower validity on average than concurrent studies. Directions for future research are discussed.