Do situational characteristics affect the validity of personality situational judgment items?

There is an ongoing debate about the value of the situational portion (“stems”) of situational judgment (SJT) test items. This study addresses whether a set of situational cues intentionally written into the stems of personality SJT items can influence how the response options are interpreted and consequently, enhance these options’ construct validity with external measures. The response options’ trait expression as scaled by raters was the main determinant of the options’ validity, but situational cues in the stems also explained meaningful amounts of incremental variability in validity coefficients.