Religious Life-Styles and Mental Health: A Follow-Up Study

This study is part of a longitudinal research project designed to discover more about the relations between religious involvement and mental health. It represents a 3-year follow-up on a group of religious young adults. Data were collected through semistructured interviews and by means of a psychological test battery. The results are discussed.     

Reforming England's Blasphemy Law to Protect the Individual

Using a framework of legal analysis proposed by Robert Post, this article examines the novel possibility of a reform in England's current criminal law of blasphemy. As previous attempts to include faiths other than Christianity faltered politically and theoretically, the article proposes a reform of the law to protect individual citizens and not religious groups. Different from incitement to racial or religious hatred legislation, this new offense would rest on what Joel Feinberg calls 'vicarious harm', the harm done directly to a person by deliberately wounding her sense of the sacred. The essay takes as given the propositions that equality before the law is desirable, a clear and ordered criminal offense is better than a vague criminal offense, and, as given specifically by the circumstances in England, a reverence for the transcendent sacred is privileged above other forms of reverence.     

RECRUITMENT EVALUATION: THE CASE FOR ASSESSING THE QUALITY OF APPLICANTS ATTRACTED

We argue that assessing attraction outcomes is critical to systematic improvement of recruitment effectiveness and offer a new assessment framework that can be adapted by all organizations for any position in any staffing scheme. These methods (a) permit outcomes of different recruitment processes–attraction, status maintenance, and gaining job acceptance–to be evaluated independently, (b) support concurrent evaluations of attraction outcomes, (c) enable cost-benefit analyses of alternative recruitment processes, (d) allow meaningful comparisons of applicants from different recruitment events, and (e) support more aggressive management of the recruitment function than is otherwise possible. An illustrative example demonstrates these methods using attraction outcome data from 5 organizations' recruitment of associate engineers and shows that not only do attraction outcomes differ, the value of those differences can be substantial.     

TRANSFER OF TRAINING: A REVIEW AND DIRECTIONS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH

Transfer of training is of paramount concern for training researchers and practitioners. Despite research efforts, there is a growing concern over the "transfer problem." The purpose of this paper is to provide a critique of the existing transfer research and to suggest directions for future research investigations. The conditions of transfer include both the generalization of learned material to the job and the maintenance of trained skills over a period of time on the job. The existing research examining the effects of training design, trainee, and work-environment factors on conditions of transfer is reviewed and critiqued. Research gaps identified from the review include the need to (1) test various operationalizations of training design and work-environment factors that have been posited as having an impact on transfer and (2) develop a framework for conducting research on the effects of trainee characteristics on transfer. Needed advancements in the conceptualization and operationalization of the criterion of transfer are also discussed.     

THE APPLICATION OF EXPLORATORY FACTOR ANALYSIS IN APPLIED PSYCHOLOGY: A CRITICAL REVIEW AND ANALYSIS

Although factor analysis has been a major contributing factor in advancing psychological research, a systematic assessment of how it has been applied is lacking. For this review we examined the Journal of Applied Psychology, Organizational Behavior and Human Performance , and Personnel Psychology over a ten-year period (1975–1984) and located 152 studies that employed factor analysis. We then analyzed the choices made by the researchers concerning factor model, retention criteria, rotation, interpretation of factors and other issues relevant to factor analysis. The results indicate that choices made by researchers have generally been poor and that reporting practices have not allowed for informed review, cumulation of results, or replicability. A comparison of results by time interval (1975–1979; 1980–1984) revealed minimal differences in choices made or the quality of reporting practices. Suggestions for improving the use of factor analysis and the reporting of results are presented.     

IMPLICATIONS OF THE MULTIDIMENSIONAL NATURE OF JOB PERFORMANCE FOR THE VALIDITY OF SELECTION TESTS: MULTIVARIATE FRAMEWORKS FOR STUDYING TEST VALIDITY

Although most studies of criterion-related validity focus on univariate relationships, the complex and multidimensional nature of the performance construct and the widespread use of multiple selection devices argue in favor of multivariate frameworks for evaluating validity. Using a Monte Carlo simulation we estimated the validity of general cognitive ability tests and personality tests in predicting "job performance," where performance is conceptualized as a composite of multiple performance measures (i.e., individual job task performance and organizational citizenship behaviors). The validity of a selection battery varies substantially as a function of the relative weight given to both predictors and criteria; the 95% confidence interval for validities ranged from .20 to .78. The effective weights given to performance dimensions accounted for 34% of the variance in selection battery validities; depending on precisely how "performance" is defined, the same test battery can have relatively high or relatively low levels of validity. Our model suggests that the way an organization defines job performance is a source of true and important variability in validities, and that the validity of selection tests for predicting complex performance criteria may show considerably less generalizability that current metaanalysis of univariate validities would suggest.     

Jealousy and the nature of beliefs about infidelity: Tests of competing hypotheses about sex differences in the United States,Korea, and Japan

The different adaptive problems faced by men and women over evolutionary history led evolutionary psychologists to hypothesize and discover sex differences in jealousy as a function of infidelity type. An alternative hypothesis proposes that beliefs about the conditional probabilities of sexual and emotional infidelity account for these sex differences. Four studies tested these hypotheses. Study 1 tested the hypotheses in an American sample (N = 1,122) by rendering the types of infidelity mutually exclusive. Study 2 tested the hypotheses in an American sample (N = 234) by asking participants to identify which aspect of infidelity was more upsetting when both forms occurred, and by using regression to identify the unique contributions of sex and beliefs. Study 3 replicated Study 2 in a Korean sample (N = 190). Study 4 replicated Study 2 in a Japanese sample (N = 316). Across the studies, the evolutionary hypothesis, but not the belief hypothesis, accounted for sex differences in jealousy when the types of infidelity are rendered mutually exclusive; sex differences in which aspect of infidelity is more upsetting when both occur; significant variance attributable to sex, after controlling for beliefs; sex-differentiated patterns of beliefs; and the cross-cultural prevalence of all these sex differences.     

TOWARD NARROWING THE RESEARCH-PRACTICE GAP IN PERFORMANCE APPRAISAL

Recently, performance appraisal researchers have adopted a cognitive approach to analyzing judgment processes in performance appraisal. While this approach allows researchers to tap a wealth of knowledge applicable to the appraisal context, this line of research is likely to widen the already existing gap between research and practice. We argue that coordination of the talents of researchers and practitioners is essential for narrowing the gap. Specifically, we suggest researchers focus their research on the best methods of ensuring use of relevant and valid data in appraisal, given organizational constraints. We also suggest practitioners focus on determining observable and measurable aspects of performance, and thus, specify appropriate appraisal content. We also note that cognitive process research has promise for increasing raters' ability to judge accurately, but that this approach does not necessarily address the rater's willingness to provide accurate ratings.