A Quantitative Approach to Content Validity1

CIVIL rights legislation, the attendant actions of compliance agencies, and a few landmark court cases have provided the impetus for the extension of the application of content validity from academic achieve-ment testing to personnel testing in business and industry. Pressed by the legal requirement to demonstrate validity, and constrained by the limited applicability of traditional criterion-related methodologies, practitioners are more and more turning to content validity in search of solutions. Over time, criterion-related validity principles and strate-gies have evolved so that the term, "commonly accepted professional practice " has meaning. Such is not the case with content validity. The relative newness of the field, the proprietary nature of work done by professionals practicing in industry, to say nothing of the ever present legal overtones, have predictably militated against publication in the journals and formal discussion at professional meetings. There is a paucity of literature on content validity in employment testing, and much of what exists has eminated from civil service commissions. The selectipn of civil servants, with its eligibility lists and "pass-fail " con-cepts, has always been something of a special case with limited trans-ferability to industry. Given the current lack of consensus in profes-sional practice, practitioners will more and more face each other in adversary roles as expert witnesses for plaintiff and defendant. Until professionals reach some degree of concurrence regarding what con-stitutes acceptable evidence of content validity, there is a serious risk that the courts and the enforcement agencies will play the major determining role. Hopefully, this paper will modestly contribute to the improvement of this state of affairs (1) by helping sharpen the content