DEVELOPING A NOMOLOGICAL NETWORK FOR INTERVIEW STRUCTURE: ANTECEDENTS AND CONSEQUENCES OF THE STRUCTURED SELECTION INTERVIEW

A review by Campion, Palmer, and Campion (1997) identified 15 elements of interview structure and made predictions regarding how applicants and interviewers might react to these elements. In this 2-sample field survey of 812 interviewees and 592 interviewers from over 502 organizations, interview structure was best described by 4 dimensions: (a) Questioning Consistency, (b) Evaluation Standardization, (c) Question Sophistication, and (d) Rapport Building. Interviewers with formal training and those with a selection rather than recruiting focus employed higher levels of interview structure. In addition, reactions to increased structure were mixed. Both higher structure (Question Sophistication) and lower structure (Rapport Building) were positively related to interviewer reactions. Less than 34% of interviewers had any formal interview training. However, interviewers were confident that they could identify the best candidates regardless of the amount of interview structure employed. Applicants reacted negatively to the increased perceived difficulty of structured interviews, but perceptions of procedural justice were not affected by interview structure.     

Developmental and sex-related differences in preschoolers' affective decision making

This study investigated developmental and sex-related differences in affective decision making, using a two-deck version of Children's Gambling Task administered to 3- and 4-year-old children. The main findings were that 4-year-old children displayed better decision-making performance than 3-year-olds. This effect was independent of developmental changes in inductive reasoning, language, and working memory. There were also sex differences in decision-making performance, which were apparent only in 3-year-old children and favored girls. Moreover, age predicted awareness of task and the correlation between the latter and decision-making performance was significant, but only in 4-year-old children. This study thus indicates that there is a remarkable developmental leap in affective decision making, whose effects are apparent around the age of 4, which according to our results, also marks the age when the correlation of declarative knowledge and decision-making performance becomes significant.     

Enjoyment and Success: Reciprocal Factors in Behavior Change

This study assessed the role of behavior enjoyableness in development of long‐term behavior. First, as expected from the literature on attitude and behavior change ( Ajzen, 1991 ; Ryan & Deci, 2000 ), initial enjoyableness of a behavior predicted how successful participants were in performing the behavior in the short term (i.e., the time until they first violated their behavioral intentions). Of primary interest, repeated successful performance was, in turn, associated with an increase in reported enjoyableness of the behavior in the longer term. The study demonstrates the importance of a reciprocal relationship of behavior enjoyableness and performance for behavior change, such that even initially non‐enjoyable behaviors can become more enjoyable with repeated performance. These findings are particularly relevant for long‐term, goal‐related behaviors.     

Judgement of Traffic Scenes: The Role of Danger and Difficulty

The growth of expertise is frequently accompanied by an increased role being played by expectancy and anticipatory behaviour. Such influences on behaviour should be readily observable in the ways participants construe task-related scenarios, and distinguishable from more general experience gained from age. This paper reports an extensive study of how matched groups of motorists conceptualize the danger involved in various video-taped driving scenarios. Results demonstrate separable effects of both age and driving experience on the factor structure of drivers' rating of such stimuli. In particular, different emphases are placed on the danger and difficulty depicted in driving scenes. Younger drivers (irrespective of driving experience) concentrate on the danger rather than on the difficulty involved in carrying out particular manoeuvres, but then under-rate the dangers encountered.     

Order of Information Affects Clinical Judgment

Family practice physicians read a case vignette describing a patient with a history of lung cancer, a new transient neurological disturbance, and a normal computerized tomographic (CT) scan of the head. They then estimated the probabilities of two diagnoses: transient ischemic attack (TIA) and brain tumor. Probability estimates of TIA were lower if the history of lung cancer was presented at the end of the case rather than at the beginning. This recency effect was found for both more and less experienced physicians and whether subjects were prompted for a single end-of-sequence probability judgment or multiple step-by-step judgments after each piece of information. These results are inconsistent with Hogarth and Einhorn's (1992) belief-adjustment model, which predicts a recency effect for the step-by-step condition but a primacy effect for the end-of-sequence condition.     

The MacQuarrie test for mechanical ability

Data originally analyzed by Charles H. Goodman on the MacQuarrie Test for Mechanical Ability are subjected to the principal axes factoring method. The maximum variance was extracted with three factors. Rotation to an oblique simple structure yielded a factor pattern which satisfies the simple structure concept more adequately than the orthogonal factor matrix, thus leading to greater clarity of interpretation of the factors.     

Spirituality in the Treatment of Alcoholism: A Worldview Approach

To consider alcoholism an addiction with a spiritual dimension has historically posed a problem for the logical positivism and egalitarian orientations of most Western-trained therapists and academics. Many of these professionals argue that to define alcoholism as including a spiritual component invites nonscientific if not mystical approaches to treatment. For this reason, it has been difficult to legitimize a definition of alcoholism that considers spiritual components to etiology or treatment. In this article, the author suggests that issues of spirituality are an important focus in the treatment of alcohol dependence. To consider spirituality as representative of how one views the world and his or her role in creation may well relieve some of a professional counselor's apprehension about inserting a “theology” into treatment.